Interesting. As someone who's never been to New York, I quite enjoyed the book. Helps I like a lot of the acts covered. You can detail reasons why you felt like it fell below your expectations - this is the closest we've got to a music book club after all aha.
Speaking of that era, Interpol guitarist Dan Kessler's brother Ted, who was a former Q magazine editor and NME writer, did a decent booked called Paper Cuts that I read on my recent holiday about how he stumbled into music journalism as a career, some anecdotes being on the job and the way Q just sort of disappeared during lockdown.