Forced to take a second job to pay the bills, former University of New Mexico archaeologist Robert Leonard took up driving a taxi in Albuquerque. One result of that experience is this collection of fragments, prose poems, and vignettes. The challenge in this review is to try to connect this work of creative nonfiction to the professional interests of anthropologists.

Understandably, Leonard’s colleagues and friends encouraged him to publish this material. Cab drivers are in a unique position to sample city life. What comes across in Leonard’s anecdotes is the city’s smarmy underbelly of transients and the service workers, mostly prostitutes and cab drivers, who serve their needs. Everyone else has his or her own car. Or is it the case that the elderly, the handicapped, and the middle-class residents shuttled back and forth to the airport do not have compelling stories to tell? Leonard’s fares have compelling stories. Theirs are lives of significance, even if they are among the most transitory and powerless inhabitants of Albuquerque. Leonard conveys their experiences with respect and honesty. As creative nonfiction, his book is a first-rate read.

It has been awhile since the ethnographic writing experiments of the 1990s introduced flâneurie to the anthropology vocabulary. This is a subgenre of creative nonfiction in which the author assumes the pose of a disinterested observer of an urban scene. The flâneur is an aimless watchful figure, a shopper with no intention of buying, an educated and wealthy citizen with the time to collect the lives of fellow residents and transform those lives into text. First practiced by Charles Baudelaire in mid-19th-century Paris and raised critically by Walter Benjamin to catch the interests of social scientists and historians, the genre was proposed a decade ago, primarily by British scholars, as an possible solution to lack of reflexivity in ethnography.

The position of cab driver is closer to that of the flâneur than it is to that of the ethnographer. Like the flâneur, the cabbie is not interested in anything except the fare and his own personal safety. This is a point Leonard makes several times in fragments. The cabbie has no question, no analytical frame, no grounded theory, no disciplinary context, no structure of authority, no warrant, and no search criteria with which to filter the information that comes over the seat in the form of monologues from passengers. The encounters last from a few minutes to about an hour. There is no second chance to check the validity of the account or to develop the details of a remark.

This is not say that Leonard did not select from among the many hours of conversation he experienced, excluding fragments that may have made certain points and including ones that are merely about the cleverness of language. But the criteria he used are ambiguous and multivocal. Of those anecdotes that did find their way into the collection, the more telling ones are situational, a term of art among flâneurs first coined by Guy Debord in his 1967 situationist manifesto, The Society of the Spectacle. To savor the full effect of Leonard’s book, I would recommend reading it together with Debord’s. Debord created a politicized aesthetic based on the way a spectacular image (i.e., a fragment that Leonard chose to include) presents itself simultaneously as society, as a part of society, and as a means of unification between the two. This contradiction stems from the quality of separation that lies at the heart of spectacle.

In Leonard’s fragments, the separation is in the time and space his passengers experience as they move through the city. The liminality frees them to reveal the truths of their lives to the stranger at the wheel. It is also the separation in class between the sex worker and her client. It is the separation between those with street addresses and those who live under bridges. It is the separation between gangs and the police, the tourists and the residents, the transnationals and the indigenous, and the two-dollar fare from the forty-dollar fare. The cab driver witnesses these divergent social relations. The fragments Leonard offers in this collection mediate between the reality of those experiences as narrated in the back of the taxi and readers’ own experiences. They become the spectacle through which we understand Albuquerque, and through Albuquerque, all cities. In this collection, Leonard makes a case for the universal in urban culture. This is perhaps its greatest contrast with urban ethnography.