IN THE PLACE TO BE: Guy Trebay’s...

IN THE PLACE TO BE: Guy Trebay’s New York by Guy Trebay, photographs by Sylvia Plachy (Temple University Press: $19.95; 384 pp., paperback original). In these collected columns from the Village Voice, Trebay describes the mean streets and intersections of New York: “The city is a living organism, someone told me. But where is the head?” He refuses to patronize or romanticize his subjects, drawing clearly etched, often harsh portraits of junkies, pushers and hookers--and of families trying to lead a semblance of a normal life in neighborhoods ravaged by the drug trade. In straightforward prose, he describes desperate lives and asks why society allows humans to exist in such squalor.