Kensington, Brooklyn

From Last Exit (NY Times, 2/3/08)
BROOKLYN WAS MINE Edited by Chris Knutsen and Valerie Steiker.
232 pp. Riverhead Books. Paper, $15.

Vapnyar’s excursions into Brooklyn’s innards are as enjoyable as the Ethiopian-born Dinaw Mengestu’s impressions of the scruffy Kensington neighborhood, where he found that “the haphazard gathering of immigrants ... had turned it into a place that even someone like me, haunted and conscious of race and identity at every turn, could slip and blend into.”