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A Memoir of Money, Luck, and Family from the Utopian Outskirts of New York City
Harper
September 2008
On Sale: August 19, 2008
368 pages
ISBN: 0061151394
EAN: 9780061151392
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Memoir
Marking the debut of a gifted new writer, The Bookmaker
teems with humanity, empathy, humor, and insight. At the heart of Michael J. Agovino's powerful, layered
memoir is his family's struggle for success in 1970s, '80s,
and '90s New York City—and his father's gambling, which
brought them to exhilarating highs and crushing lows. He
vividly brings to life the Bronx, a place of texture and
nuance, of resignation but also of triumph. The son of a buttoned-up union man who moonlighted as a
gentleman bookmaker and gambler, Agovino grew up in the
Bronx's Co-op City, the largest and most ambitious
state-sponsored housing development in U.S. history. When it
opened, it landed on the front page of The New York Times
and in Time magazine, which described it as "relentlessly ugly." Agovino's Italian American father was determined not to let
his modest income and lack of a college education define
him, and was dogged in his pursuit of the finer things in
life. When the point spreads were on his side, he brought
his family to places he only dreamed about in his favorite
books and films: the Uffizi, the Tate, the Rijksmuseum; St.
Peter's, Chartres, Teotihuacán. With bad luck came shouting
matches, unpaid bills, and eviction notices. The Bookmaker is both a bold, loving portrait of a family
and their metropolis and an intimate look into some of the
most turbulent decades of New York City. In elegant and
soaring prose, it transcends the personal to illuminate the
ways in which class distinctions shaped America in the last
half of the twentieth century.
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