GROWING UP IN BRIDGEPORT IN THE 40S AND 50S is a collection of essays written by the author and published in The Bridgeport Leader over a two-year period, from 2002 to 2004. Drawn from the author's memory, these essays describe the sights and sounds, adventures, drama, humor and tragedies of the author's youth. With its informal and familiar tone, and its recurring references to local figures and locales, the author draws the reader into this world, making it more than just the memoirs of a single individual; instead the memoirs of a small Midwestern oil town.
From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Barbarian Days, this narrative nonfiction classic documents the rising inequality and cultural alienation that presaged the crises of today. “A status report on the American Dream [that] gets its power [from] the unpredictable, rich specifics of people’s lives.”—Time “[William] Finnegan’s real achievement is to attach identities to the steady stream of faceless statistics that tell us America’s social problems are more serious than we want to believe.”—The Washington Post A fifteen-year-old drug dealer in blighted New Haven, Connecticut; a sleepy Texas town transformed by crack; Mexican American teenagers in Washington State, unable to relate to their immigrant parents and trying to find an identity in gangs; jobless young white supremacists in a downwardly mobile L.A. suburb. William Finnegan spent years embedded with families in four communities across the country to become an intimate observer of the lives he reveals in Cold New World. What emerges from these beautifully rendered portraits is a prescient and compassionate book that never loses sight of its subjects’ humanity. A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • A LOS ANGELES TIMES BEST NONFICTION SELECTION Praise for Cold New World “Unlike most journalists who drop in for a quick interview and fly back out again, Finnegan spent many weeks with families in each community over a period of several years, enough time to distinguish between the kind of short-term problems that can beset anyone and the longer-term systemic poverty and social disintegration that can pound an entire generation into a groove of despair.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review “The most remarkable of William Finnegan’s many literary gifts is his compassion. Not the fact of it, which we have a right to expect from any personal reporting about the oppressed, but its coolness, its clarity, its ductile strength. . . . Finnegan writes like a dream. His prose is unfailingly lucid, graceful, and specific, his characterization effortless, and the pull of his narrative pure seduction.”—The Village Voice “Four astonishingly intimate and evocative portraits. . . . All of these stories are vividly, honestly and compassionately told. . . . While Cold New World may make us look in new ways at our young people, perhaps its real goal is to make us look at ourselves.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer
The StoryThe story begins in the early 1930s in a place called Bridgeport-a dirt-poor coal mining, steel mill town that more than earned its nickname Beerport. Little more than a smudge on the map of Ohio, this was a place that one could be happy to say they were from, only because they no longer lived there. Yet, almost mysteriously, very few people ever left. It was like a Bermuda Triangle on the Ohio/West Virginia border, except it was your future that disappeared. How does a sickly boy born into this time and place-in the midst of the Great Depression - even get the idea, let alone the courage to escape Beerport? What stirs the soul to venture beyond the familiar? From whence stems the fortitude to peek over the fence and dream of a life that no one you know can confirm even exists? It can happen and Breaking Out of Beerport provides pages of testimony. It is the early life, the memoir, the adventures, of the author, Al Scheid. Al describes growing up in a culture that scorned education, as sons followed fathers into dead-end laboring jobs. He developed attitude problems in high school and was a poor student, nearly flunking out. He might have been named "most unlikely to succeed," except that most of his fellow students deserved the same title. On top of all that, he was also a loner, prone to fits of anger often leading to fights. A rocky family life contributed to his personal problems.He had one saving grace. He developed an unusual habit that was not appreciated in his environs. He loved to read; a local newspaper at first, and then books. He devoured books of all kinds, but especially classic adventure novels. This reading took him into the world of men with the courage to face life and win-men very different than those surrounding him. A wise teacher encouraged and guided his reading, which reinforced his urge to escape the life he saw around him. But he still lived in Beerport after all, and there were things there you couldn't learn by reading books. This was no place for a bookworm. Lucky for him, there were convenient places for real-life education in his town. Al learned to hustle pool for money; he phoned betting numbers and ran errands for local racketeers. Making a few dollars any way he could manage dominated his life. A relentless and deep first-love romance kept him whirling in this maelstrom. Through all of this, he learned to read people; size them up; win them over, and how to close the deal. There was little chance he would achieve higher education, but he graduated summa cum laude from the College of Street Smarts.A sudden, major setback caused him to rethink his future and hitchhike out of town. The love of his life remained loyal but didn't follow him. His is the story of an intriguing journey that will take you from this town, through the military, all the way to the gold coast of California and beyond. There are stops along the way that defy connect-the-dots logic and the love affair that wouldn't die. The rest of the book is about the unexpected events that led to a master's degree from Harvard University. The saga will keep your interest late into the night. More than a memoir, Breaking Out of Beerport reads like a novel. It is a lesson in history, a primer in psychology, and a study of culture as it explores self-realization in a time before this new-age term became fashionable. The story is not just about another poor boy that overcame adversity and achieves success - it is much more. There are frequent twists and turns, as unexpected events shape a young man's twenty-seven year journey to a goal. At the end the reader is left hoping for a sequel.
In the 1950s, Confidential magazine, America's first celebrity scandal magazine, revealed Hollywood stars' secrets, misdeeds, and transgressions in gritty, unvarnished detail. Deploying a vast network of tipsters to root out scandalous facts about the stars, including sexual affairs, drug use, and sexual orientation, publisher Robert Harrison destroyed celebrities' carefully constructed images and built a media empire. Confidential became the bestselling magazine on American newsstands in the 1950s, surpassing Time, Life, and the Saturday Evening Post. Eventually the stars fought back, filing multimillion-dollar libel suits against the magazine. The state of California, prodded by the film studios, prosecuted Harrison for obscenity and criminal libel, culminating in a famous, star-studded Los Angeles trial. This is Confidential's story, detailing how the magazine revolutionized celebrity culture and American society in the 1950s and beyond. With its bold red-yellow-and-blue covers, screaming headlines, and tawdry stories, Confidential exploded the candy-coated image of movie stars that Hollywood and the press had sold to the public. It transformed Americas from innocents to more sophisticated, worldly people, wise to the phony and constructed nature of celebrity. It shifted reporting on celebrities from an enterprise of concealment and make-believe to one that was more frank, bawdy, and true. Confidential's success marked the end of an era of hush-hush—of secrets, closets, and sexual taboos—and the beginning of our age of tell-all exposure.
The bestselling classic biography of Jackie Robinson, America's legendary baseball player and civil rights activist, told from the unique perspective of an insider: his only daughter. Sharon Robinson shares memories of her famous father in this warm loving biography of the man who broke the color barrier in baseball -- and taught his children that the only measure of life is the impact you have on others lives'. Promises to Keep is the story of Jackie Robinson's hard-won victories in baseball, business, politics, and civil rights. It looks at the inspiring effect the legendary Brooklyn Dodger had on his family, his community ... his country. Told from the unique perspective of Robinson's only daughter, this intimate and uplifting book includes photos from the Robinson family archives and family letters never published before. Jackie Robinson is one our great national heroes. Promises to Keep reminds us what made him a champion -- on and off the field!
