Brooklyn? Bah. Manhattan? Meh. A New Book Calls the Bronx the City’s Best Borough.

PARADISE BRONX: The Life and Times of New York’s Greatest Borough, by Ian Frazier

“The Bronx? No thonx,” wrote the poet Ogden Nash for The New Yorker in 1931.

It’s surprising that Ian Frazier’s latest book, a fat and occasionally even phat history of the borough, omits this memorable epigram, later recanted. First, like Nash, he’s a New Yorker man known as a humorist, though a mostly prose-y one (a hundred bloggers toddled so that his Cursing Mommy could run).

Second, “Paradise Bronx” aspires to greatcomprehension, stretching from before the glacier that 14,000 years ago covered the New York Botanical Garden — and indeed most of the city — to the fires that infamously punctuated Howard Cosell’s commentary on the Yankees during the 1977 World Series, and what has since risen from the ashes: hip-hop, murals, shiny new high rises.

“The Bronx? It honks!” is Frazier’s basic riposte.

His sentiment for the place isn’t entirely explained; certainly he’s not Ianny From the Block. A previous chronicler of Siberia and the Great Plains, Frazier writes about how in young adulthood, when New York was at its “Ford to City: Drop Dead” economic nadir, he was a self-identified “gentrifier” in Manhattan, living in a former candy factory in SoHo for a dozen years until he was priced out. He watched the underwhelming bicentennial fireworks from the West Side Highway and was dining with “my friend Jamaica” (Kincaid) in Chelsea during the ’77 blackout, seeing news of the subsequent riots uptown later that week on television from his home state of Ohio.

He now resides in Montclair, N.J., and when he compares complicated urban housing policy to “the details the contractor is telling you about why you are going to need a new basement” those of youse without ownership of a basement might wonder for whom exactly this book is intended.

As Bill Bryson did on the Appalachian Trail, though, Frazier has logged many, many steps in the Bronx, setting out, he writes, to walk a thousand miles there, sometimes 10 at a time. It is just as much of a hike, with steep hilly terrain that “registers in your calves,”, and arguably more treacherous, given the interstate highways, like the one Justice Sonia Sotomayor had to cross to get from Co-Op City, the massive housing development built in the 1960s, to Cardinal Spellman High School.