• Author: Michael J. Agovino
• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Harper; 1 edition (August 19, 2008)
• ISBN-10: 0061151394

In the 1960s, the author's parents seemed poised to join the exodus of Italian-American families from New York to the suburbs. Instead, thanks to the chronic gambling debts of his father, Hugo, a city welfare bureaucrat who ran an illicit sports-betting operation on the side, they wound up in the Bronx—at the vast Coop City housing project that became a watchword for urban anomie. Ignoring overdue bills and eviction notices, his parents insisted the family partake of the finer things—books, museums, opera, European vacations—all financed by bad checks and fast talking. Journalist Agovino, telling long, colorful conversations from decades past (in a disclaimer Agovino says he taped his parents recalling stories and conversations), paints a loving, picaresque portrait of his youth and the tension between his mother's yearning for middle-class stability and his father's faith in the big score. He sets it amid an elegy for a white, ethnic New York—the old-country foods, the lovable wise guys—that expired in Coop City's windswept Le Corbusierian sterility. Unfortunately, the author's family seems more eccentric than iconic, and Agovino's narrative, meandering from Caribbean travelogue to summer food-service jobs, doesn't impart much shape to their sociocultural journey.

(Source: Publishers Weekly)

Freelance journalist Agovino's debut investigates how people are shaped by the places they inhabit. When Co-op City opened in the Bronx in 1968, this series of enormous towers was hailed as a worker's paradise, a utopia, the future of urban housing in America. It was also called "eminently depressing," "monumental in size, minimal in planning" and "relentlessly ugly." Agovino moved to this mythical place with his Italian-American family on a wave of hope and apprehension. But their odyssey began years earlier, before the author's birth, when his father Hugo had to flee East Harlem after forgetting to place a bet for a high powered "racket guy" who came looking for the money he would have won. Catastrophes, near-catastrophes and big wins would prove to be the defining themes in Hugo's life. Gambling kept its hold on him after he married Cora from Brooklyn, after they had children, after they moved to Co-Op City and even after Hugo landed a job in the Department of Social Services. The family's fortune rose and fell with each wave of luck in the bookmaking business he ran on the side. Agovino's history is rich with the mythology of immigrant strivers, but with its own series of twists linked to his erudite, proud and reckless father. The book also offers a unique portrait of the mutability of class, as his parents visited the Uffizi in Florence after a good streak and fretted over making payments on their son's tuition after a bad streak. Crafting a joint portrait, Agovino occasionally lets minutiae about his kin-precious when viewed from within, less so from without-overpower the more dramatic chronicle of Co-Op City. For the most part, however, he strikes a nice balance between thehistories of a beloved place and a turbulent family. A generally engrossing narrative of class and mobility in urban America.

(Source: Kirkus Reviews)

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