David Garnes

Back to Manhattan David Garnes

David Garnes follows up his previous memoir, FROM MY LIFE: TRAVELS AND ADVENTURES, with a new volume of personal essays, BACK TO MANHATTAN: A LIFE IN NEW YORK. A collection of sharply sketched impressions of New York in the decades of the Sixties and Seventies, BACK TO MANHATTAN is also a journal of sorts of a young man's coming of age during a period of personal growth and social upheaval. Having spent nearly 20 formative years in Manhattan, the author revisits in prose some New York landmarks familiar to all, as well as haunts known to inveterate New Yorkers but less so to the occasional visitor. From the campus of Columbia University to the midnight streets of Greenwich Village in the post-Stonewall years to the ageless beauty of The Cloisters and Gramercy Park, BACK TO MANHATTAN is an homage to a New York that was and a celebration of the timelessness of the greatest city in the world. Helen Keller, who felt more than most of us, once described her need for the big city: "Cut off as I am, it is inevitable that I should sometimes feel like a shadow walking in a shadowy world. When this happens, I ask to be taken to New York City. Always I return home weary, but I have the comforting certainty that mankind is real flesh and I myself am not a dream." David Garnes is also the author of AFTER THE WAR WAS OVER: POEMS OF AN AMERICAN CHILDHOOD; WAITIN' FOR THE TRAIN TO COME IN: A NOVEL OF WORLD WAR II; and the forthcoming SAL'S WAR: A NOVEL. A former English teacher and academic librarian, he lives in Connecticut.