The Citistates Group

NEAL PEIRCE. Just imagine the cutting-edge knowledge and skills encompassed in a modern citistate — especially one, like Boston, that specializes in the intellectual pursuits, scientific discovery and innovation.

Fittingly enough, the Boston Globe has just put on an Ideas Boston 2004 conference, two days of some of the region’s brightest and most adventuresome minds, in 20-minute bursts of information, insight, prediction, mixed celebration of their unfolding fields and warnings of the new century perils they discern. A pair of bloggers kept the region informed of each unfolding presentation.
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ALEX MARSHALL: Even the best written newspaper column often withers and loses its juice, once removed from its original setting, both physically and temporally. Once a few years have passed, even a master like the late Murray Kempton, my personal favorite, can’t always hold my interest in a long-over political campaign or news event.

Because of this, books made up of newspaper columns often just aren’t very good. The events they describe are over, and their peculiarly short narratives often add up to a series of appetizers that leave you hungry for the main course.

Surprisingly and happily, the opposite is true with a new book, Subwayland: Adventures in The World Beneath New York (St. Martin’s Griffin 2004), by New York Times reporter Randy Kennedy. Kennedy’s vignettes about the trains and stations that millions of New Yorkers use every day are tasty and appealing, perhaps even more so then when they first appeared in his column “Tunnel Vision” every Tuesday inside the Times‘ Metro section.

For one thing, I often missed them in the Times, which I read daily. Secondly, Kennedy’s stories, at least the ones chosen here, may work even better in a book because they are often leisurely stories unrelated to current events. In a daily newspaper, a reader obsessed with the war in Iraq might have trouble slowing themselves down to read about “Mr. Poem,” the station attendant who wrote verse in his spare time and posted it on the public blackboard, or about the blind mules who helped dig out the tunnels in 1902. But in a book, these timeless stories add up to a lot of knowledge about the workings of the system that is so central to so many lives.

Of course, this book will probably appeal most to New Yorkers who use the subway daily and want to know more about it. But I suspect it will also appeal to just about anyone who enjoys community, a little trivia and a lot of colorful characters.