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Home Girl: Building a Dream House on a Lawless Block

By Karen Algeo Krizman, Special to the Rocky

Published July 31, 2008 at 7 p.m.

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* Nonfiction. By Judith Matloff. Random House, $25. Grade: A-

Book in a nutshell: When foreign correspondent Matloff decides it's time to put down roots, she moves to New York City and impulsively buys a dilapidated townhouse in West Harlem. Having survived life in Sudan, Rwanda and Chechnya, she thinks converting this "fixer-upper" into a dream home will be a breeze. However, she soon learns that her street is ground zero for the city's wholesale cocaine sales, her new abode is a former crack house now riddled with termites and structural problems and the former tenant - a drug-addled squatter - is camped out next door plotting to reclaim the house as his own.

Despite being greeted each day by drug dealers doing business on her front stoop and watching her own walls crumbling around her, Matloff perseveres and shares her adventures in home ownership in this delightful and humorous book that details the sense of community she eventually came to experience in the place she still calls "home."

Best tidbit: Shortly after 9/11, Matloff all but put an end to drug dealing in her neighborhood - at least temporarily - when she started the rumor that cocaine and heroin had been tainted with anthrax. She first whispered the "news" to a dealer outside her house, and within 24 hours the street was clear of drug dealing. Matloff's rumor even made it into the local Spanish-language press, and her husband noted that it was "probably the only time that (she) had an impact on an event as a journalist."

Pros: Matloff is a superb storyteller, and her book is littered with colorful characters that are so bad they're good, including Salami, the whacked-out squatter next door; Mackenzie, the literary-loving homeless guy who drops by for coffee each day; Miguel, the gentlemanly lieutenant of the local drug gang; and Matloff's own mother, who sweet talks the drug dealers into saving her a parking spot whenever she comes to visit.

Cons: The book goes on a chapter or two too long.

Final word: It doesn't take a genius to see "movie deal" written all over this memoir.