Paradise Bronx - by Ian Frazier

Book Synopsis

Winner of the 2025 Gotham Book Prize

Ian Frazier's magnum opus: a love song to New York City's most heterogeneous and alive borough.

Ian Frazier, one of our best observers and describers, has been walking the Bronx for fifteen years. Paradise Bronx goes deep into the eventful and tumultuous history of this amazing New York City borough, a super-vibrant in-between place that attaches the rest of the city to North America. From Jonas Bronck, who bought land from the local Lenape tribes, to the formerly gang-wracked South Bronx, which gave birth to hip-hop, Frazier's loving exploration of this singular cityscape is a richly textured, raucous, moving tour de force about the polyglot culture that is the United States today.

During the American Revolution, when the Bronx was disputed territory known as the Neutral Ground, George Washington's troops fought some of the war's decisive battles there. Gouverneur Morris, the most outlandish of the Founding Fathers, who wrote the Preamble to the Constitution and served as ambassador to France during the Terror, owned a huge swath of the Bronx, lived and died there, and put it and the rest of the city on a path to greatness.

Frazier shows us how the coming of the railroads and the subways drove the settling of the Bronx in successive waves of migration--Irish, German, Italian, Jewish (think the Grand Concourse), African American, Caribbean, Puerto Rican (J.Lo is one of the Bronx's most famous citizens). The romance of the Yankees, the disaster of the Cross Bronx Expressway, the flowering of hip-hop and rap, the resurgence of community as neighborhood heroes banded together and rebuilt after the years of destruction and fire--all are described and celebrated in
Frazier's inimitable voice.

This is a book like no other about a quintessential American place and the resilience and resourcefulness of its citizens.

Review Quotes

"Frazier loves the idea of uncovering what people might not clearly see--might not even be looking for--and connecting it to the present day . . . Though it's as fundamentally foolish as declaring a Great American Novelist, if forced to pick a Great American Nonfiction Writer, I might choose Ian Frazier, because his work has always resolutely quested to explore, experience, and explain his nation." --Dan Kois, Slate

"Ancient Rome had its Livy, and now the Bronx has its epic chronicler in Ian Frazier . . . a compelling chronicle of the Bronx, all the more effective for its clear-eyed take on a subject so often drenched in sentimentality
or distaste." --Edward Kosner, The Wall Street Journal

"A profound portrait of this storied place . . . Vivid profiles of historical figures . . . The culmination of many years of passionate inquiry, Frazier's deep history--grandly detailed, vibrant, and caring--does right by the resilient, ever-morphing Bronx." --Booklist (starred review)

"[An] appreciation of a unique area that will appeal to those who have had enough tales of Manhattan." -- Kirkus Reviews

"Having grown up in the Bronx, and having always thought of the borough as a series of interchangeable immigrant neighborhoods, this book comes as a marvelously encyclopedic surprise, full of historical dazzle and cultural richness. An absolute pleasure to read!" --Vivian Gornick, author of Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader

"Once known as the Jewish Borough, the Bronx is the real New York. Resilient, diverse, tolerant, brash, ethnic, competitive, and ambitious, it seemed to have everything, not just the Yankees and the Bronx Zoo, but Parkchester, City Island, the real Little Italy, Orchard Beach, Loehmann's, the Loews Paradise, Krum's and Jahn's ice cream parlors, and the largest produce market in the western hemisphere. Readers may not agree with all of Ian Frazier's many judgments, but they will enjoy the tales and the anecdotes. If you ever lived in the Bronx, you can't miss this entertaining and informative book which brings us up to the present." --Kenneth T. Jackson, editor-in-chief, The Encyclopedia of New York City, and president emeritus of the New-York Historical Society.

About the Author