cover image The Bookmaker: A Memoir of Money, Luck, and Family from the Utopian Outskirts of New York City

The Bookmaker: A Memoir of Money, Luck, and Family from the Utopian Outskirts of New York City

Michael J. Agovino, . . HarperCollins, $24.95 (353pp) ISBN 978-0-06-115139-2

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, with an apparently verbatim recall of long, colorful conversations from decades past, 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. Photos. (Sept.)