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 great  comprehension, 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.

With some glee he notes more than once that Robert Moses, head honcho of a highway system that ruined wide swaths of the city, is interred in a columbarium right near a particularly loud traffic intersection.

In his wanderings, Frazier finds significance in signage (hypnotically repeating the auto-shop phrase “FLAT FIX” over the course of one chapter ) and encounters various neighborhood sages. Some gamely explain local phenomena, like the cheery decals temporarily applied to windows of abandoned buildings; others brush him off. Like Lester Burnham in “American Beauty,” he romanticizes swirling plastic bags.

Source-wise the book is a melting pot (or perhaps an act of “dynamic compaction,” as the onetime borough president Fernando Ferrer refers ruefully to a toxic-rubble disposal process). Frazier mines memoirs, like Grandmaster Flash’s, previously conducted interviews from Fordham’s Bronx African American History Project (BAAHP) and his own articles. He is keenly sensitive to the pain of various populations and individuals, and to the twin scourges of drugs and gang violence.

But “Paradise Bronx” is a ramble in every way: physical, chronological, pedagogical. (There are charmingly hand-drawn maps, but a few photographs would have helped further orient out-of-towners.) Frazier lingers on the biography of Gouverneur Morris, the native “proto-Bronxite” whose name is all over the area: a founding father who gave the preamble to the U.S. Constitution its lyricism and perished after an infection caused by trying to unblock his urinary tract with a piece of whalebone. (Add that to Tangerine Kitty’s list of “dumb ways to die.”)

As Frazier sees it, both the man and his birthplace were terminally “in between.”  The Bronx is smaller than both Queens and Brooklyn but has the moxie of Manhattan, unsoftened by hipster arrivistes, “a hand reaching down” to barely tethered Staten Island. It’s the only borough attached to the mainland, making it a site of cyclical conflictand neglect: a place many people go through to get somewhere else.

Frazier plunges deep into the area’s ugly racist history, which included so-called slave markets for domestic workers on Prospect Avenue, and tidally changing demographics. It is currently majority Hispanic; the multitude of ethnicities and nationalities flowing in and out over the years makes for a dazzling pageant. “We have residents from every continent, if you count the penguins from the zoo,” the history professor Lloyd Ultan tells him.

Periodically, Frazier makes plain, the Bronx has been Arcadia, if not nirvana. Before it became the Bronx, it was like the Hamptons, with rich families taking trains and stagecoaches up to their mansions. For a time it was the “piano-making capital of America,” back when pianos were essential living-room furniture, not consigned to the dump. Stella D’Oro cookies  and the hilariously faux-Scandi Häagen-Dazs ice cream were once both manufactured there. Harold Bloom and E.L. Doctorow sprang from the Bronx. James Baldwin went to high school there. W.E.B. Du Bois, Edgar Allan Poe and Leon Trotsky flickered through. Irving Berlin is buried at Woodlawn.

At least half a dozen times, our nouveau Baudelaire of the borough retraces on foot the trail that an aghast President Jimmy Carter took in his motorcade when it looked like a war zone, marveling at the change. Frazier smells marijuana, overhears a sermon, admires recent rowhouses eclipsed by a willow’s “bouffant foliage.” Bucko, we get it: A tree does not just grow in Brooklyn.

PARADISE BRONX: The Life and Times of New York’s Greatest Borough | By Ian Frazier | Farrar, Straus & Giroux | 576 pp. | $35