Mark Kurlansky is the writer many others want to be: his career in journalism took him to Europe, China, the Caribbean and Middle East, and he lived for a time in Mexico City. His award-winning books are enormously popular despite addressing unusual subjects, notably the complex histories of cod, salt, and the Basques.

He has also written an acclaimed novella, and has a column in Food and Wine magazine about the history of food (he was once a pastry-chef).

Now he has his debut novel out; the dense, witty and acutely observed Boogaloo on 2nd Avenue, set in New York's Lower East Side where he once lived - a lively ensemble of Hispanic, Italian and Jewish characters.

That brief career synopsis however doesn't account for his book on Jewish communities in Europe today (The Chosen Few: The Resurrection of European Jewry) or articles in Harper's, The New York Times, and the International Herald Tribune. Or his 1968: The Year That Rocked The World, a study written two years ago about that gear-changing, revolutionary period.

I spoke to him in his office on New York's Upper West Side, across the road from where he lives with his wife and young daughter.

GR: I guess at the moment you are in promotional mode for Boogaloo on 2nd Avenue?

MK: To tell you the truth I've just gotten through with promoting the paperback of last year's 1968 book, but by the time I get to New Zealand I will be in Boogaloo promo-mode. So I'm just starting up.

GR: Let me ask you about that then. Two years out from having finished writing that book [1968], how do you feel about having to re-address it when you have already finished something else?

MK: Actually I love talking about 1968. It's so much easier talking about non-fiction than fiction anyway. I sometimes think there is nothing really to be said about a novel but 'read the book'. I have a jaundiced view of literary critics.

GR: Is that from having been on the receiving end?

MK: Not at all, I just think of the great writers of my lifetime who have died like Hemingway, Steinbeck and Graham Greene and how after they died there was all of this analysis of their works that never seemed necessary at the time, you could just read their books.

GR: As your book makes clear, there was a rare convergence of idealism, dissent and technology in 1968.

MK: Yeah, a combination of things that will never again come together in quite that way.

GR: Because today we are too tribal, we are separate tribes within a city, different countries and so on?

MK: I'm not sure I agree with that. 1968 was the beginning of a shift to the kind of world we live in, a much more global and international world. What we're doing right now most likely we would not have been doing in 1968. International phone calls? The hassle you would have had to go through with the international operator calling you back. It wouldn't have been worth it.