"New York Diaries - 1609 to 2000" - Review - NYTimes.com When Simone de Beauvoir, the French existentialist, first tried to smoke marijuana, she, like Bill Clinton, did not inhale. It was May 3, 1947, and she was as new to New York City as she was to the drug. Friends taught her how to breathe in the smoke, but she was immune to its effects. "I feel guilty," she wrote, glumly, in her diary. No angel bothers to lift me from earth. She added, "I turn toward the bottle of bourbon." Beauvoir's unrequited love for marijuana is among the highlights of "New York Diaries: 1609-2009," which is the most convivial and unorthodox history of New York City one is likely to come across. This book's editor, Teresa Carpenter, a longtime Village Voice writer, has had the ingenious idea to comb through hundreds of diaries, written by the famous, the infamous and the unknown in New York, and to liberate these chronicles of their crunchiest and most humane bits. She has good knife skills. She lays this material out in calendar rather than chronological format - the book moves from January to December - thus providing strange and satisfying juxtapositions. Thus the entries for Jan. 18 include George Washington, in 1790, suffering with sore gums and, in 1943, Tennessee Williams rattled by crab lice. Williams, quoting a friend, calls this plague his "occupational disease." Did I say that Beauvoir's efforts to inhale were among this book's highlights? There are so many fine moments in "New York Diaries: 1609-2009" that it's impossible to list them all. There's Dawn Powell on getting her palm read by a Gypsy. There's Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. on spying Richard M. Nixon, post-Watergate, gathering logs outside his Manhattan apartment across the way. Schlesinger observes that Nixon's "weakness for open fireplaces must count as one of his more disarming characteristics." There's Mark Twain on Russian baths, Edgar Allan Poe on loathing Brooklyn ("I know few towns which inspire me with so great disgust and contempt"), Noël Coward on Sputnik and Michael Palin on being photographed nude by Richard Avedon. There's also Marianne Moore, live-blogging the 1963 World Series. Willie Davis has blinding speed ... going to third. He's there. Collections like this one - volumes of stray letters or anecdotes - tend to be hobbled by built-in defects. Reading them can be unsustaining and ill-making, the equivalent of eating only the yolks from eggs or the middles from Oreos or the livers from geese. One's intellectual diet requires fiber too. Ms. Carpenter mostly avoids this problem by mixing her material so well, blending the quotidian with the extraordinary. Many entries are as laconic as this one, from Jan. 5, 1864: "Snowed all day. Commenced to take out our guns. Or this one, from May 20, 1842: "Shot a cat, dead, dead, dead." And there's this, from Jan. 6, 1842: "Smoked volcanically, and read Burns." Old New York drifts in graceful, telling snippets before one's eyes. There are diary entries about the construction of Grace Church, about memories of ice skating on the canal that is now covered by Canal Street, about crabbing on the East River. We witness Henry Hudson getting his first sights of the river that would be named for him. "History's meant to be a bummer, not a stroll down memory lane," the British historian Simon Schama wrote in Newsweek this week, in a takedown of the PBS series "Downton Abbey." Ms. Carpenter's volume doesn't shrink from New York's present and past bummers, and doesn't traffic in Hallmark card uplift. There are many diary entries about the Revolutionary and Civil Wars. Indians are massacred, slaves are sold. Epidemics of typhoid, cholera and yellow fever rage, as one commentator puts it, like hyenas. The Triangle shirtwaist factory burns. Jews are barred from the Algonquin. Edna St. Vincent Millay undergoes an "operation they call a "D. and C." " AIDS arrives. Anaïs Nin, in 1913, speaks for quite a few of the diarists when she calls the city "an ugly prison." The material here can be combed, like Rod Stewart's hair, in many directions. The political entries include Harold Ickes at cocktails in 1939 with Fiorello La Guardia, an account of Lincoln's funeral procession, Alexander Hamilton killed by Aaron Burr in a duel and a discussion by Mario M. Cuomo in 1980, before he was governor of New York, of a pet bird owned by his son, Andrew, the current governor. The food writing is as lively as a big Friday-night table at Balthazar. There are accounts of meals in Chinatown by Albert Camus and by Beauvoir with Richard Wright. Charles Dickens describes oysters "as large as cheese-plates." There's this funny account of a meal with George Washington: "At every interval of eating or drinking he played on the table with a fork or knife, like a drumstick." The emotional arc of "New York Diaries: 1609-2009" bends toward autumn and toward Sept. I wish the accounts of that day and its repercussions provided here were richer, though their tone surely captures some of our tone. This book's first entry about the trade center attacks is filled with multiple exclamation points and words and phrases like "people are freaking out" and "superbizarre" and "super razor blade vibe everywhere." I could pick more lint and dog hair from this book's well-made sweater. If I never read another sentence by Ned Rorem (even his name scans like an anagram for boredom), I'll die happy. I yield to no one in my admiration for Slate magazine, but perhaps too many recent entries in this book were culled from a good 2000 book called "The Slate Diaries." A Twitter message might have been included. These are misdemeanors. This book pushes to the surface some unexpected stars, people whose diaries you will wish to consume in their entirety. Among them are Toni Bentley, whose entries from her "Winter Season: A Dancer's Journal" (1982) are lovely. They also include Judith Malina, a founder of the Living Theater. The sections from "Diaries of Judith Malina: 1947-1957," about hanging out at the San Remo with people like Weegee, and lusting after that stud muffin James Agee, are simply excellent. That book is out of print and needs rescuing. And who knew that José Martí and Thomas Edison wrote so well? Let me close, in this spirit of these collected diaries, with a snippet from a relative nobody, a blogger and restaurateur from Brooklyn named George Weld. A few days after the Sept. 11 attacks he wrote this beautiful thing, which should be stamped on this book's spine: "People keep asking me if I want to get out of the city now. I don't want to get out at all: I feel I've been nailed to this city forever, tattooed as its own.