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Last Block In Harlem, The (2010)

by Christopher Herz(Favorite Author)

3.08 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

1935597043 (ISBN13: 9781935597049)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

AmazonEncore

review 1: This book was going so well for about the first half, then it started to gradually veer off course, and then the plane crashed into a mountain in the last 20 pages or so. The ending was bungled in a way that's so epic that I actually kinda respect it. If you gave me the first 14 chapters of this book and told me to write two final chapters that completely ruin it, as some silly writing assignment, I don't know that I could come up with something as bizarre as what this guy came up with. I don't have as vivid an imagination.Not that this was necessarily the great American novel up until that point. But I really did like the idea behind it. Some yuppie marketing a-hole moves into an apartment in Harlem. He falls in love with the area and the people, and he hates his job, bec... moreause it's marketing. One day he has a Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire moment and decides to quit his job and focus on sweeping the sidewalk. No, really. But then the media takes notice, and he gets funding from a politician (a corrupt one, natch), and the whole thing turns into one huge clusterfuck. Someone who's not high should rip that idea off for a film.
review 2: A young man and his wife return to his roots, a block in Harlem where he writes and she goes to work as an architect. Yuppies, not in their own mind. When he sees the neighborhood is "trashy" he goes to work, sweeping it up. But his good intentions get caught up with ambitions to change Harlem to an area of affluency and he becomes a part of it -- for a while. Once he and the people on the block realize what's happening, they try to turn things around with one unintended result - the accidental death of his wife. His despair and what happens to him and his neighbors is the "suspense" part of the book -- totally unexpected ending. Great characters and I really got involved in what happens to the last block in harlem, rooting that it survives its roots. less

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