If only commercial realities allowed New Zealanders to enjoy long-form journalism. We have no shortage of talented writers, but lack - leaving aside the blogosphere, where it's best left - the kind of outlet that would offer them the necessary elbow room.
This volume of the collected essays and journalism of Charles D'Ambrosio shows what pleasure is to be had when a first-class writer is given their head and space to roam.
The much-decorated D'Ambrosio is a product of Seattle, and the second (and title) piece in the collection is set there, and expresses the author's ambivalence to the cold, wet place of his birth.
It's an apt intro: you get to know him - his humour, his erudition (in the first piece, he quotes Augustine), his empathy with the underdog, his self-deprecation.
He has stumbled across an incident - a man, presumed armed, is holed up in his grotty bedsit and a SWAT team is there trying to dislodge him. A bunch of citizens is standing in the rain and the pre-dawn, listlessly watching. Nothing happens, and D'Ambrosio ruefully reflects on his inadequacies as a journalist: "I just don't have an instinct for what's important. I realise that now, looking over my notes. My first note was about the old alleys in Seattle, those island places where sticker bushes flourish and a man can still sleep on a patch of bare earth, where paths are worn like game trails and leave a trace of people's passing, and how these naturally surviving spots are systematically vanishing from the city, rooted up and paved over mostly because they house bums - an act of eradication that seems as emotionally mingy as putting pay slots on public toilets."