Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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There Goes The Block

St. Marks Is Dead: The Many Lives of America's Hippest Street by Ada Calhoun

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I had already known I was going to like Ada Calhoun’s tapestry of St. Marks stories and lore by the time I got halfway through it. But it’s what she said when inserting herself that took it to another level for me. Calhoun was raised on the block through childhood and when talking about how chaotic and troublesome things were off St Marks in the 70s and 80s, she mentioned the resentment of some locals…including herself. That despite the great arts and music scene and […]

She Used to Meet Me on the (Lower) East Side

The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream by Patrick Radden Keefe

Lush Life by Richard Price

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Read two consecutive books whose geographies bumped up against each other; one set in Manhattan’s Chinatown, the other set partially in it, as well as the adjacent East Village. Both were excellent in their own respective ways. The Snakehead How is Patrick Radden Keefe so damn good at writing non-fiction? This doesn’t reach the heights of Say Nothing (really what can?) but it’s a fascinating story in its own right and Keefe tells it well and thoroughly, providing enough detail without larding the narrative. He also takes […]

The Jewish immigrant experience in a delightful memoir

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Although dubbed a novel, Up From Orchard Street is a memoir in the same way Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes was—honest, poignant, often painful, but filled with the sights, smells and sounds of the immigrant experience. Widmer’s story takes place in New York’s Lower East Side in the ‘30s, where many Eastern European Jews had settled in search of a new and hopefully better future in the U.S. Manya Roth, aka Bubby, is the indulgent mother of flashy womanizing smart-alecky Jack, her only child from a […]



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