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THE POPE OF BROOKLYN

Name: THE POPE OF BROOKLYN
Author: Joseph Di Prisco
ISBN: 978-1-945572-11-1

by Joseph Di Prisco ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 14, 2017

Despite some solipsistic meandering, a deft, amusing, and tough memoir.

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A literary son traces his fugitive father in a pulpy yet cerebral memoir.

Novelist Di Prisco (The Alzhammer, 2016, etc.) roots this sequel to his previous memoir, Subway to California (2014), in his serendipitous discovery of a raft of trial transcripts concerning his father, a small-time criminal and gambling addict who helped crooked New York City cops shake down bookmakers and then testified against them, apparently receiving consideration for his own offenses. This explained the family’s flight during his childhood from Brooklyn to California but opened up numerous other questions for him. “My father didn’t exactly come out of nowhere, but it was close,” writes the author. “It was on the mean streets of Brooklyn in the hardscrabble fifties where he made his bones.” The memoir’s strongest aspect is this unsparing portrait of his family as a whirl of combative intensity. Although Di Prisco always saw his father as “unmanageable, impulsive, bottled-up, unhinged,” his volatile mother and his brother (who himself became a career criminal and heroin addict) considered him “a liar and a con man, a chump and a loser.” The author relies on the trial transcripts (and other primary sources such as family letters) to evoke both a vanished urban era and a seamy moral landscape of casual criminality: “All of us kids knew of the hit man who lived on the block.” Yet, despite his father’s lifelong gambling habit and tendency toward prevarication, he redeemed himself later in life as a labor union executive, winning nine consecutive elections: “He took pride in the job and worked very hard….His Brother Teamster leaders always spoke of him in laudatory terms.” This sprawling narrative is punctuated by Di Prisco’s reflections on literature, faith, mortality, and his own tangled romances and outré experiences, ranging from cocaine addiction to mentoring adolescents. When his father died after their relationship had finally stabilized, he wondered, “for whom, besides myself, am I writing this book?”

Despite some solipsistic meandering, a deft, amusing, and tough memoir.

Pub Date: March 14, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-945572-11-1

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Rare Bird Books

Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

- BOOK REVIEW
THE GOOD FAMILY FITZGERALD
by Joseph Di Prisco

- BOOK REVIEW
THE ALZHAMMER
by Joseph Di Prisco

- BOOK REVIEW
SUBWAY TO CALIFORNIA
by Joseph Di Prisco

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)