Interesting Books About The Bronx

TROUBLE AT RED WALL BY JOE BRYCELAND . I was minding my own business at a meeting of the BRONX CLUB in THE VILLAGES, Florida on 2/16/10. I was sitting at a table with Charlie Bryceland, a Weekly Golf Partner, whom I look to as a fatherly figure on all matters social and political because of his wisdom and age. He's from The Old Neighborhood (Melrose & 161st). Another Alumni, Jerry O'Shea, another WISE Man, advised me once that I should seriously ponder Charlie's words. Well Charlie says to me, Hey! Did you hear that my kid brother JOEY wrote a book? I said JOEY, no way! Now Joey was in the SSPP CLASS OF 1956 (A Great Class) as was myself and Gene Lalor who wrote "AN IMMODEST PROPOSAL FOR ENDING AND WINNING THE WAR ON TERROR: A Curmudgeon’s Plan For Survival". I enjoyed Gene's Book. Now this Book is a WESTERN, an escape from reality. I loved and read all that was written by Louis L'Amour. I cannot wait to read Trouble At Red Wall available thru AMAZON .com. 2/24/10: WOW! I got a great read out of “TROUBLE AT RED WALL” by Joe Bryceland. It’s 310 pages long and I went thru it in one reading session. It’s not Louis L’Amour but it reminded me so much of one of his western novels. I was a great fan of L’Amour and, at one time, I could not get enough of his books. I eagerly look forward to any new books by Joe Bryceland.	“The REMARKABLE LIFE OF KITTY MCINERNEY” : Christopher Prince recounts the life of his grandmother, a poor Irish immigrant who raised 17 children in the Bronx during the Great Depression. The book is as much a celebration of the rich community life in the Bronx during the ‘30s and ‘40s as it is an enlightening history of the evolution of the South Bronx around St. Anselm’s Church and School and Tinton Avenue told through the eyes of one special resident. KITTY “The Remarkable Life of Kitty McInerney” can be ordered at: http://www.amazon.com/Remarkable-Life-Kitty-McInerney-Depression/dp/1449539270

WHEN THE BRONX BURNED. Oct 2007 Release. In his novel, When the Bronx Burned, John Finucane, a retired lieutenant with the New York City Fire Department, tells the fascinating story of the burning of New York’s South Bronx during the late 1960s and 70s; an era when arson-for-profit drove hundreds of thousands of people from their homes. It’s an intriguing story that shows a New York that most people are completely unfamiliar with. The premise allows for a great deal of conflict and action, for the heroes aren’t just fighting flames, they are fighting a brutal gang of arsonists, the slumlords that employ them, and the political machine that permits the scheme to take place. John Finucane is a former Sts Peter & Paul neighborhood guy from Cauldwell Avenue	AN IMMODEST PROPOSAL FOR ENDING AND WINNING THE WAR ON TERROR: A Curmudgeon’s Plan For Survival America and the whole of western civilization are involved in a war to the death with the Islamic world. Many Americans refuse to accept that truth or face the reality that we’re engaged in a worldwide war as they would rather ignore it, hope it goes away, and presume it won’t truly affect us. In this book Gene Lalor, PhD, discusses the world today and how the liberal mind-set has affected the political climate. He advocates a two-phase plan for ending and winning the War on Terror that not only includes the continuity of the United States but the continuity of the American way of life. The United States can only survive, Lalor asserts, if we understand some of the fundamental facts: • We’re not immortal, either as individuals or a nation; • Our cherished rights and privileges as a people are strangling us as a nation; • With this Islamic foe, if we don’t kill them first, they’re going to kill us. Lalor’s vision is not a doomsday scenario; he promises there is a solution and a future if we prevail and survive – but neither is a given. This book is not a book about the BRONX but is written by one of our own. Gene Lalor is a graduate of SS Peter & Paul in 1956. He earned a BA at Fordham University and a Master’s degree and PH.D from St John’s University. He is a retired English teacher and has published a number of articles in various publications. Lalor and his wife Rosemary live on Long Island, New York.
Art walks in New York: Delightful Discoveries of Public Art and Gardens in Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island	Urban Mythologies: The Bronx Represented Since the 1960s
Billy Bathgate E.L. Doctorow. New York: Random House, 1989. A portrayal of the New York gangster world of the 1930's as related through the eyes of a 15-year-old boy	The Boy Without a Flag: Tales of the South Bronx. Abraham Rodriguez, Jr. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 1992. Harshly realistic evocation of life for young people in the South Bronx. Young Adult suggested reading.
The Bronx Boy: No More Awnings in The Bronx. Gerald C. Flynn. Huntington,WV: University Editions, 1993. JIMS relates his experiences growing up in the Bronx, in Naval aviations, and as a professor of Spanish.	The Buddha Book. Abraham Rodriguez, Jr. New York: Picador, 2001. Two teenage boys create an underground comic book that tells true tales about their lives in the South Bronx. Young Adult suggested reading.
El Bronx Jerome Charyn. New York: Mysterious Press, 1997. The mayor struggles to keep the Yankees and save the Bronx from destroying itself.	El Bronx Nicholas Mohr. New York: Harder & Row, 1975. A novella and short stories drawn from the author's past about the lives and struggles of Puerto Rican migrants in the South Bronx in the years from 1946 to 1956. Young Adult suggested reading.
Growing Up Bronx Gerald Rosen. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 1984. All Danny Schwartz wants is a normal American childhood, but in his eccentric family this is hard to come by. This coming of age story takes place in the 1940s and 1950s	Inside, Outside. Herman Wouk. Boston: Little, Brown, 1985. Focuses on the Jewish-American experience through the life of one man, his immigrant parents, and the Bronx neighborhood where he grew up
City Boy: The Adventures of Herbie Bookbinder. Herman Wouk. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969. This story of an eleven-year old Bronx boy and his adventures in school, at home, and at summer camp takes place in the years before the Depression.	The Kingsbridge Plot. Maan Myers. New York: Doubleday, 1993. Set in New York during the revolutionary period. A young doctor, John Tonnerman, pursues a killer and uncovers a plot to assassinate General George Washington. Mystery
.The Old Neighborhood. Avery Corman. New York: Linden Press, 1980. The coming of age of a young man in the Bronx with vivid scenes of life as it was in the l940s and l950s.	The Ryer Avenue Story Dorothy Uhnak. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993. A murder in a Bronx neighborhood in 1935 has lifelong consequences for six youths, one of whom is the killer, and one of whom sees his own father executed for the crime.
Santeria, Bronx. Judith Illsley Gleason. New York: Atheneum, 1975. With the help of Santeria and its practicing priestess, Concha, Raymond attempts to straighten out his life after the death of his parents.	The Wanderers. Richard Price. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974. The Bronx in the 1960s is the setting for this story of the coming of age of a gang of Italian-American adolescents.
The War at Home. Nora Eisenberg. Wellfleet, MA: Leapfrog Press, 2002. This memoir-novel set in the Bronx in the 1950s relates the life Lucy Lehman shares with her older brother, battle-fatigued father, and drug-addicted mother.	Where You Belong Mary Ann McGuigan. New York: Atheneum, 1997. In 1963, after thirteen-year-old Fiona runs away from home and reunites with her former classmate Yolanda in an all-black neighborhood of the Bronx, she finds both comfort and controversy
World's Fair. E.L. Doctorow. New York: Random House, 1985. The story of a Bronx childhood of the 1930s set against the drama of the 1939 World's Fair.	Bronx Boy: A Memoir Jerome Charyn's three-part memoir of his boyhood in the Bronx has all the imagery and color of an enchanting and entertaining novel -- someone has said that it captures the author's world so accurately that it can't possibly be true. Bronx Boy, like The Dark Lady of Belorusse and The Black Swan
The Dark Lady from Belorusse: A Memoir The routine betrayals of borough politics and the dirty deals of black marketeers are brilliantly captured in Jerome Charyn's memoir of his early childhood in the Bronx of World War II. The Dark Lady from Belorusse is essentially a loving portrait of Charyn's mother, a brave and beautiful Jew from White Russia, who at 32 becomes a dealer in a weekly poker game where the principal players are the Irish politicians who run the Bronx in the 1940s.... This is a terrific little book.	The Black Swan: A Memoir Picking up where his much-praised memoir The Dark Lady from Belorusse left off, Jerome Charyn continues the story of his childhood adventures in the Bronx. The year is 1949, and 11-year-old "Baby" (the nickname survived the 1947 arrival of younger brother Marve) regularly skips school to sneak off to a local movie theater, the Luxor. He's informally adopted by the theater's three eccentric owners, Bronx natives and classmates at Harvard who dropped out to purchase the Luxor and share a nearby apartment. Two of them pine for their former high school teacher, the married (and alcoholic) Mrs. Green, while the third burns with unrequited passion for a handsome fireman. Next, Baby connects with a local gangster, who sends him out to collect protection money from the area's businesses, ostensibly as payment for cases of celery tonic. The extensive stretches of dialogue are as colorful as the characters, and if it all seems a little too picturesque to be believable, well, the "Note to the Reader" does admit that the people, places, and events depicted "are the product of imaginative recreation." Who cares? Charyn's roistering account brings to life postwar New York City with such vividness and gusto that if it isn't true, it ought to be. --Wendy Smith
The Beautiful Bronx (1920-1950). A native Bronxite takes us back to the heyday years of the Bronx.	The Birth of The Bronx: 1609-1900. Lloyd Ultan and Gary Hermalyn. Bronx, NY: The Bronx County Historical Society, 2000.
The Bronx: It Was Only Yesterday (1935-1965). Lloyd Ultan and Gary Hermalyn. Bronx, NY: The Bronx County Historical Society, 1992.	The Bronx: Lost, Found, and Remembered (1935-1975) Writing the book was a pleasure in many ways. It gave me the chance to look at lots of Bronx pictures, and thereby travel back in time to a different, and usually better, time. Nobody who lived, worked or had relatives in the Bronx is immune to the lure of nostalgia for those kinder days.
.History in Asphalt: The Origin of Bronx Street and Place Names, Borough of the Bronx, New York City Randall Comfort. New York: North Side News Press, 1906.	McNamara's Old Bronx. John McNamara. Bronx, NY: The Bronx County Historical Society, 1989.
Bronx Accent: A Literary and Pictorial History of the Borough. Ultan and Unger chronicle the rise, fall, and rebirth of New York City's northernmost borough in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry by people who live or lived in the Bronx, or who simply chose to write about it.	Poems and Tales of Edgar Allan Poe at Fordham.