Life on the Ledge: Reflections of a New York City Window Cleaner

Having moved to New York to fulfill his creative dream-hitting it big in a punk rock band-freelance writer Hanson soon found himself viewing the city ""as the skyscraper does,"" hooked to the outside of a high-rise office building working as a window cleaner. Hanson's memoir has plenty of engaging material to draw from, and occasionally soars on the engaging details of his precarious day job, but a lack of focus and confidence proves crippling to the narrative. In his discussion of window-washing, Hanson is effortlessly sharp, insightful and funny (""I get paid by the window, not by the hour""), but this fascinating perspective is too often clouded by banal talk of his writing aspirations (getting into Columbia's Graduate School of Journlaism) and distracting, self-conscious stabs at establishing his literary and cultural chops (as in his irrelevant, overlong aside on ""a 'Christo' building-when a building undergoing extensive exterior work gets wrapped in plastic, just as Christo, the artist, has done to such buildings in Berlin's Reichstag""). It's missteps like these that keep this book from getting off the ground.