#2 in the Milan Jacovich mystery series. Milan hunts for a con man who scammed the Mob. He's shadowed by mob flunky Buddy Bustamente, who sports a polyester leisure suit, white patent leather shoes, and matching white belt—that 1970s fashion statement once unkindly dubbed the “full Cleveland.”
"When we were rich, we had no real use for the Easter Bunny." With trademark elegance and wit, Boyce Parkman, the young narrator of Terry Reed's smart, sexy novel, The Full Cleveland, begins the story that follows a privileged Shaker Heights family's dramatic reversal of fortune -- and an American girl's unforgettable coming-of-age. Bright, athletic, charming, the five Parkman children appear to be living the American dream in a beautiful house in a beautiful neighborhood. But as Boyce is transformed from a precocious ten-year-old into a passionate, idealistic young woman, she comes to see the dream as an illusion. Part of the problem is her parents. Dad, the Protestant, seems intent on nurturing his children with the noble ideals of an obsolete generation. He wants them to see great works of art and to witness the realities of life on the other side of the tracks, in the slums of inner-city Cleveland. Mother, the Catholic, is hell-bent on having her kids achieve something in life, and her method is to make them pray for it. Add the confusing influences of teenage life in a charmed world -- the gorgeous girls, the beautiful boys, the sudden friend: school genius, scholarship student, and bus driver's daughter. Finally Boyce has to find her own philosophical path through the turmoil of her adolescence and the unraveling of her family's fortunes. Her first real love, her first defiant act, her first glimpse of a universe outside her own all mark her as she navigates her way through comic detours and unexpected turns of fate. Here is an original voice that dazzles and delights, a heroine both fierce- hearted and funny, who sets out to find the true meaning of success. In the end, the fortune lost is seamlessly linked with childhood's passing, becoming a deft metaphor for the journey of everyman, and every girl. The Full Cleveland takes its place on the short shelf of great coming-of-age fiction.
#2 in the Milan Jacovich mystery series. Milan hunts for a con man who scammed the Mob. He's shadowed by mob flunky Buddy Bustamente, who sports a polyester leisure suit, white patent leather shoes, and matching white belt—that 1970s fashion statement once unkindly dubbed the “full Cleveland.”
Offers a brief history of the city before the author's birth in 1939, then focuses on the author's life in the city and the ups and downs it faced during those seventy years.
The Routledge Dictionary of Modern American Slang and Unconventional English offers the ultimate record of modern American Slang. The 25,000 entries are accompanied by citations that authenticate the words as well as offer lively examples of usage from popular literature, newspapers, magazines, movies, television shows, musical lyrics, and Internet user groups. Etymology, cultural context, country of origin and the date the word was first used are also provided. This informative, entertaining and sometimes shocking dictionary is an unbeatable resource for all language aficionados out there.
#8 in the Milan Jacovich mystery series . . . Hotshot young Cleveland lawyer Joel Kerner is shotgunned to death on a lonely beach on the Caribbean island of San Carlos. The local police are inept, and the Cleveland cops can’t operate outside their jurisdiction, so Kerner’s sister Patrice comes to private eye Milan Jacovich (it’s pronounced MY-lan YOCK-ovich) to discover the truth about her brother’s murder. Milan flies to San Carlos to investigate—a pleasant three-day working vacation that doesn’t keep him from getting stabbed in an alley and rousted by a high-level international cop. Back in Cleveland, he asks his best friend, homicide lieutenant Marko Meglich, for some unofficial help. But he runs up against Kerner’s angry father, a world-famous labor attorney, along with the bevy of beautiful women Joel Kerner left behind and a powerful union leader known around town as “The Irish.” Milan marches forward to solve the case, though it will eventually cause him a tragic and insupportable personal loss.
In the midst of one of late twentieth century America’s worst recessions, Ed Podolak, an unemployed worker from western Pennsylvania, winds up in Cleveland looking for a job. It’s Christmas Eve, and all he has to his name is forty-eight bucks—and that isn’t nearly enough to buy Christmas presents for his wife and his kids. On impulse, he steals a wad of cash from the kettle of a downtown street-corner Santa. He thinks he’s gotten away with it—until he realizes he’s been observed by a bright-eyed six-year-old boy.
Fans of Les Robert's "Milan Jacovich" mystery series will enjoy this memoir in which Roberts tells how he discovered the heart and soul of a city while fictionalizing it for the series.
Booklist Top of the List Reference Source The heir and successor to Eric Partridge's brilliant magnum opus, The Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, this two-volume New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English is the definitive record of post WWII slang. Containing over 60,000 entries, this new edition of the authoritative work on slang details the slang and unconventional English of the English-speaking world since 1945, and through the first decade of the new millennium, with the same thorough, intense, and lively scholarship that characterized Partridge's own work. Unique, exciting and, at times, hilariously shocking, key features include: unprecedented coverage of World English, with equal prominence given to American and British English slang, and entries included from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, India, South Africa, Ireland, and the Caribbean emphasis on post-World War II slang and unconventional English published sources given for each entry, often including an early or significant example of the term’s use in print. hundreds of thousands of citations from popular literature, newspapers, magazines, movies, and songs illustrating usage of the headwords dating information for each headword in the tradition of Partridge, commentary on the term’s origins and meaning New to this edition: A new preface noting slang trends of the last five years Over 1,000 new entries from the US, UK and Australia New terms from the language of social networking Many entries now revised to include new dating, new citations from written sources and new glosses The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English is a spectacular resource infused with humour and learning – it’s rude, it’s delightful, and it’s a prize for anyone with a love of language.