The Heart of the World

Reviews / Votes

The verbal energy that pours off these pages is enough to transform the hell of places like Times Square into a roughhewn heaven, neon lit and open all night. The history of Broadway has been written before but never better...Overflowing with voluble "animal spirits," it is a feast for anyone who loves good stories. The only thing wrong with it is, it isn't longer. * Newsweek * Not since Damon Runyon wrote his fables of Harry the Horse, Sleepout Sam Levinksy and Lone Louie, has Broadway had a chronicler to do justice to its picaresque excess...The Heart of the World is a walk up Broadway, an imaginative leap into its past and its present. Runyon wrote fiction based loosely on fact. Cohn writes fact with the vividly colourful brush-stroke of fiction * Sunday Telegraph * Cohn's walk up Broadway is a fascinating trip for, though the Great White Way has fallen on desperate times, he manages to fit in a lot of the street's history along with his vivid stories about its sleaze-ridden present. His style is electric, crackling with one-liners * Sunday Times * A kind of day trip through an X-rated Disneyland, full of hucksterism and magic and tawdry, hard-luck scenes...Cohn weaves a story retrieved from all the histories of New York: the tales of Wall Street and ward-boss politics, of theater and finery and sex, money, power. * Boston Globe * Here comes everybody, a cavalcade of misfits, each their own short story, and Cohn in the role of recording angel * Independent * Of course I'm a Nik Cohn fan. His name is actually kind of a password. If somebody says they know about Nik Cohn, you know that person is literate -- and cool -- Jay McInerney Published in 1991, The Heart of the World is a collection of oral histories about life on Broadway... The worlds Cohn describes are long gone, replaced by shopping malls and Starbucks. I'd rather remember it his way. -- Fiona Wilson * The Times *