The Portland Oregonian's reviewer likes Charlie LeDuff's collection of New York Times pieces, Work and Other Sins: Life in New York City and Thereabouts, published in January.

Alternating between the powerfully moving and the humorously weird, the stories, often no longer than several hundred words, testify to LeDuff's relentless work ethic and energy, not simply his talent as a stylist. This is a reporter who goes out and spends time with his subjects, soaking up the places they inhabit and clearly relishing his journalistic engagement with them. At their best, LeDuff's stories recall some of those written by Joseph Mitchell, the legendary writer for The New Yorker magazine, who captured the same milieu that LeDuff writes about.

LeDuff, of course, is in the NYT's Los Angeles bureau.