BOY OUTA BROOKLYN An actress is slaughtered. An actor is haunted.A life is taken. A life is revealed.Boy Outa Brooklyn is a murder-memoir driven by my obsession with the unsolved murder of my friend - Carrie. It is a filthy, funny, forensic examination of her death and my life which zooms from the violent streets of my Brooklyn boyhood to the porn-drenched streets of Times Square. This is the world of Goodfellas, Taxi Driver and The Deuce and the world where Carrie came to die. Boy Outa Brooklyn is a celebration of lost New York written by a dissolute altar boy and unregenerate White Guy. It is a hard-boiled detective story and picaresque "Diary of An Actor You Never Heard Of" filled with tales of fights and flops on both sides of the Atlantic. Fans of Tropic of Cancer, Portnoy's Complaint, the comedy of Lenny Bruce and the works of Iceberg Slim, Jean Shepherd and David Sedaris will enjoy reading Boy Outa Brooklyn.
Follow the growth and fortune of Aaron Scholssberg as he moves from boyhood to early adulthood, from domestic turmoil to gutsy independence, from Brooklyn to Manhattan and the open sea. The story records the shaping of a young sensibility under the influence of a powerful place and time. While laying out a boy's moral and romantic journey, Brooklyn Boy also pays homage to and is a personal mapping of a legendary site. Aaron's history is Brooklyn's.
At age sixteen, Bill German began publishing a Rolling Stones fanzine out of his bedroom in Brooklyn. And when he presented an issue to the band on a street in New York, he obviously made an impression: before he knew it, the Stones had hired him to document their career, inviting him in to the studio and to their private jam sessions. He traveled the world with them, stayed at their homes, and, for almost two decades, witnessed their wild parties and nasty feuds. Yet through it all, he never lost his identity as that “nice boy from Brooklyn.” Under Their Thumb is a fish-out-of-water tale about a fan who wanted to know everything about his favorite rock group—and suddenly learned too much. This updated edition, published to mark the Stones’ sixtieth anniversary, features forty new pages of text and more than thirty never-before-seen photos.
When author Francis Chester-Cestari was born, his mothers friend proudly held him up and proclaimed, This day a farmer has been born. But as Chester-Cestari grew older, he realized that Brooklyn, New York, was not conducive to farming; he dreamed of the day he could break out and be free to farm. In this memoir, Chester-Cestari narrates a story of faith, hope, and determination. Bustin Outta Brooklyn traces his familys Italian roots, follows his path through a succession of Catholic schools, and details his entrepreneurial efforts beginning at age ten when he started his own farming business. Bustin Outta Brooklyn provides colorful insight into Chester-Cestaris life as he struggled to do the right thing while growing his business as a shepherd with Cestari farms and wool mill owner and through a fifty-year career as an attorney. This memoir illustrates that through hard work, dedication, and resolve, anyone can indeed achieve lifes dreams.
Martin H. Levinson lived in Brooklyn from his birth in 1946 to 1962, the height of the baby boom following World War II. He grew up two blocks from Ebbets Field, the home of the Brooklyn Dodgers, and attended Erasmus Hall High School, which boasts alums such as Neil Diamond, Barbra Streisand, and chess-wiz Bobby Fischer. The author's personal recollections of his middle-class childhood in Brooklyn during the 1950s alternate with chapters detailing seminal cultural events of that era including the advent of television, fast-food restaurants, big cars with fins; desegregation and the white flight to the suburbs; rock and roll, beatniks, hula hoops, The Kinsey Reports, the Cold War, McCarthyism, Playboy, and much more. Part memoir, part social history, Brooklyn Boomer offers a captivating portrait of Brooklyn and America in the mid-twentieth Century.
A powerful, bracing and deeply spiritual look at intensely, troubled youth, Last Chance in Texas gives a stirring account of the way one remarkable prison rehabilitates its inmates. While reporting on the juvenile court system, journalist John Hubner kept hearing about a facility in Texas that ran the most aggressive–and one of the most successful–treatment programs for violent young offenders in America. How was it possible, he wondered, that a state like Texas, famed for its hardcore attitude toward crime and punishment, could be leading the way in the rehabilitation of violent and troubled youth? Now Hubner shares the surprising answers he found over months of unprecedented access to the Giddings State School, home to “the worst of the worst”: four hundred teenage lawbreakers convicted of crimes ranging from aggravated assault to murder. Hubner follows two of these youths–a boy and a girl–through harrowing group therapy sessions in which they, along with their fellow inmates, recount their crimes and the abuse they suffered as children. The key moment comes when the young offenders reenact these soul-shattering moments with other group members in cathartic outpourings of suffering and anger that lead, incredibly, to genuine remorse and the beginnings of true empathy . . . the first steps on the long road to redemption. Cutting through the political platitudes surrounding the controversial issue of juvenile justice, Hubner lays bare the complex ties between abuse and violence. By turns wrenching and uplifting, Last Chance in Texas tells a profoundly moving story about the children who grow up to inflict on others the violence that they themselves have suffered. It is a story of horror and heartbreak, yet ultimately full of hope.
The untold story about the struggles and achievements of the first Black person to hold public office in Brooklyn, New York. Bertram L. Baker immigrated to the United States from the Caribbean island of Nevis in 1915. Three decades later, he was elected to the New York state legislature, representing the Bedford Stuyvesant section. A pioneer and a giant, Baker has a story that is finally revealed in intimate and honest detail by his grandson Ron Howell. Boss of Black Brooklyn begins with the tale of Baker’s rise to prominence in a fascinating era of Black American history, a time when thousands of West Indian families began leaving their native islands in the Caribbean and settling in New York City. In 1948, Bert Baker was elected to the New York state assembly, representing the growing central Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford Stuyvesant. Baker loved telling his fellow legislators that only one other Nevisian had ever served in the state assembly. That was Alexander Hamilton, the founding father. Making his own mark on modern history, Baker pushed through one of the nation’s first bills outlawing discrimination in the sale or rental of housing. Also, for thirty years, from 1936 to 1966, he led the all-Black American Tennis Association, as its executive secretary. In that capacity he successfully negotiated with white tennis administrators, getting them to accept Althea Gibson into their competitions. Gibson then made history as the first black champion of professional tennis. Baker represents a remarkable turning point in the evolution of modern New York City. In the 1940s, when he won his seat in the New York state assembly, Blacks made up only four percent of the population of Brooklyn. Today they make up a third of the population, and there are scores of Black elected officials. Yet Brooklyn, often called the capital of the Black Diaspora, is a capital under siege. Developers and realtors seeking to gentrify the borough are all but conspiring to push Blacks out of the city. Boss of Black Brooklyn not only explores Black politics and Black organizations but also penetrates Baker’s inner life and reveals themes that resonate today: Black fatherhood, relations between Black men and black women, faithfulness to place and ancestry. Bertram L. Baker’s story has receded into the shadows of time, but Boss of Black Brooklyn recaptures it and inspires us to learn from it. Praise for Boss of Black Brooklyn “[A] valuable addition to New York history . . . . This shines a necessary light on an all-but-forgotten black politician from the pre–civil rights era.” —Publishers Weekly “A potent reminder that history isn’t very old . . . What makes this biography all the more powerful is that as Baker’s grandson, the author Ron Howell . . . offers a personal prism on a transplanted West Indian family and political ascension.” —The New York Times
“An intoxicating Manhattan fairy tale…As affecting as it is absorbing. A thrilling debut.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “A vital, sensuous, edgy, and suspenseful tale of longing, rage, fear, compulsion, and love.” —Booklist (starred review) A transcendent debut novel that follows a critic, an artist, and a desirous, determined young woman as they find their way—and ultimately collide—amid the ever-evolving New York City art scene of the 1980s. Welcome to SoHo at the onset of the eighties: a gritty, not-yet-gentrified playground for artists and writers looking to make it in the big city. Among them: James Bennett, a synesthetic art critic for the New York Times whose unlikely condition enables him to describe art in profound, magical ways, and Raul Engales, an exiled Argentinian painter running from his past and the Dirty War that has enveloped his country. As the two men ascend in the downtown arts scene, dual tragedies strike, and each is faced with a loss that acutely affects his relationship to life and to art. It is not until they are inadvertently brought together by Lucy Olliason—a small town beauty and Raul’s muse—and a young orphan boy sent mysteriously from Buenos Aires, that James and Raul are able to rediscover some semblance of what they’ve lost. As inventive as Jennifer Egan's A Visit From The Goon Squad and as sweeping as Meg Wolitzer's The Interestings, Tuesday Nights in 1980 boldly renders a complex moment when the meaning and nature of art is being all but upended, and New York City as a whole is reinventing itself. In risk-taking prose that is as powerful as it is playful, Molly Prentiss deftly explores the need for beauty, community, creation, and love in an ever-changing urban landscape.
The voices of Brooklyn: “I’m a Brooklyn guy, it’s in my bones and it’s there in Brooklyn. There’s a certain rhythm you get growing up there. Every Brooklyn kid has it. Always on the right beat. The Bronx, no; Queens, you were out of it; but Brooklyn, that was it.” —Mel Brooks, Williamsburg “Everyone got along because we had one major thing that held everyone in Brooklyn…together: the emergence of big-time sports that happened after World War I. You could be an Irishman, an Italian, and a Jew and you could all be in Ebbets Field, sitting together, rooting for the Dodgers.” —Pete Hamill, Park Slope “I never really saw anyplace in the world as a kid except Brooklyn, so to me Brooklyn was the world. Every avenue was another country. It was a rough place, to be sure. You could say the wrong thing, make the wrong turn and be rubbed or killed, and I guess I was lucky because I had a talent that enabled me to get out . . . A part of me will always be that kid shooting hoops, with a dream in my hand as much as a basketball.” —Stephon Marbury, Coney Island “Both my parents were hard, hands-on workers, and that was the foundation of everything for me. Their work ethic was just over the top, and as a result of that I worked hard no matter what level job I had in the media. I was that tough Brooklyn girl pushing my way to the front, which eventually became the top. I was never afraid of hard work; I was always a go-getter, and that was something that came directly out of being born in Brooklyn. I cherish that, as I cherish my entire upbringing in Brooklyn.” —Maria Bartiromo, Bay Ridge A captivating oral portrait of America's favorite borough, in the words of those who know Brooklyn best—Mel Brooks, Spike Lee, Arthur Miller, Joan Rivers, Norman Mailer, Cousin Brucie, Maria Bartiromo, Pete Hamill, and many other current and former inhabitants. Song of Brooklyn gathers the oral testimony of nearly one hundred Brooklynites past and present, famous and unknown, about a mythic borough that is also an indisputably real place. These witnesses speak eloquently of what it was like back then, when the Dodgers played in Ebbets Field; later, when the borough fell on hard times; and now, when it has come roaring back on the tracks of a real-estate boom, giving it celebrity chic and hipster cred. With this surprising and inspiring renaissance in full swing, the story of Brooklyn is one of the great and still ongoing chapters of the American urban experience, and Song of Brooklyn sings that tune in pitch-perfect key.
