For displaced, misplaced, and nostalgic ex-Brooklynites
THE BROOKLYN BOARD BOOKSTORE
| These books were selected for their connection with Brooklyn. If you have roots in Brooklyn, then these should be part of your library. This list will be updated on a regular basis, so you should check back frequently. Please note that the prices shown are subject to change. | ||
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A Child's Christmas in Brooklyn
by Frank Crocitto Our Price: $14.95 Hardcover Availability: Usually ships within 2-3 days |
Frank Crocitto's A Child's Christmas In Brooklyn is a wonderful
memoir of growing up in Brooklyn in the 1940s. What is
particularly striking is not just the wonderful anecdotal
stories but the way they are physically and visually laid out
for the reader in a line-on-the-page format that is almost
lyrically poetic in its presentation. A Child's Christmas In
Brooklyn is marvelous reading for any Christmas season and a
delight for anytime of the year -- especially for that "window
in time" feeling taking us back on a nostalgic tour of Brooklyn
through a child's eyes.
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Apartment 4B, Like in Brooklyn
by Evan Ginzburg List Price: Our Price: $13.45 You Save: $1.50 (10%) Paperback Availability: Usually ships within 24 hours |
"Evan Ginzburg has put into words the emotions and experiences
of growing up in the ever-changing Brooklyn of the 60s and 70s:
a Brooklyn that is lost forever. We read several tales on the
air and they're funny, poignant and most certainly memorable." -
Fred Geobold, WBAI-FM, NYC
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Brooklyn Is: Southeast of the Island: Travel Notes
by James Agee List Price: Our Price: $11.86 You Save: $5.09 (30%) Hardcover Availability: Usually ships within 24 hours. |
Introduced by Jonathan Lethem, author of the riveting and
place-defining novel Motherless Brooklyn (1999), Agee's prose
poem captures the textural variety of Brooklyn in language that
bears reading aloud for its lilt, melody, and pleasingly pungent
vocabulary: "The collaborated creature of the insanely fungoid
growth of fifteen or twenty villages, now sewn and quilted edge
to edge, and lacking any center in remote proportion of its
mass, [Brooklyn] is perhaps the most amorphous of all modern
cities."
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In the Shadow of the El
by John Fabrizio List Price: Our Price: $10.08 You Save: $5.42 (35%) Paperback Availability: Usually ships within 24 hours. |
Through the coming-of-age experiences of a boy in Brooklyn,
Fabrizio takes us back to a time "when things were better" or
"to the gold old days" - whether they were or not. In this
collection of evocative and heartfelt vignettes, we are drawn
back to themes such as the uncertainty and awkwardness of first
love, the games we played in the park, the restrictions and
tensions of grammar school and the Church, and the drama and
resolution of the "big game" in the neighborhood. Fabrizio has
warmly rediscovered his lost Eden in traces of the corner candy
store, the beautiful little girl with marble brown eyes,
slurping lemon ices, prying open johnny pumps on sultry nights,
and rubbing up new spaldeens. This book is for all who still treasure their lost Eden. |
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Coney Island: Lost and Found
by Charles Denson List Price: Our Price: $18.87 You Save: $11.08 (37%) Paperback Availability: Usually ships within 24 hours |
Growing up on Coney Island in the ’50s and ’60s, Charles Denson
experienced legendary amusements and attractions like the
Cyclone and Thunderbolt roller coasters, the Parachute Jump, and
Steeplechase Park. In CONEY ISLAND: LOST AND FOUND, Denson gives
us an insider’s look at one of New York’s best-known
neighborhoods, weaving together memories of his childhood
adventures with colorful stories of the area’s past and
interviews with local personalities, all brought to life by
hundreds of photographs, detailed maps, and authentic
memorabilia. CONEY ISLAND is a heartfelt chronicle that
stretches from colonial times to the island’s heyday in the
early 20th century and through its subsequent decline and
revival, culminating in the 2001 opening of the new ballpark
that brought baseball back to Brooklyn.
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A Brooklyn Dodger Reader
by Edited by Andrew Paul Mele Our Price: $39.95 Hardcover Availability: Usually ships within 24 hours |
The Brooklyn Dodgers are one of the most popular and most
beloved baseball teams of all time. This book is a collection of
writings about the Dodgers, arranged chronologically to give the
readers a sense of the team’s long history.
Included are news reports, articles and excerpts from both
fiction and non-fiction works, written by some of the best
baseball writers of the past sixty years. Among them are James
L. Terry (excerpted from Long Before the Dodgers); John Lardner
("The Unbelievable Babe Herman"); Red Barber and Robert Creamer
(excerpted from Rhubarb in the Catbird Seat); Harold Parrott
(excerpted from The Lords of Baseball and "Owen Drops Third
Strike"); Robin Roberts and C. Paul Rogers, III (excerpted from
My Life in Baseball); Red Smith ("Erskine Fans 14 Yanks," "Over
the River" and "Last Chapter").
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Street Fighting Man
by Dennis Jones Our Price: $28.99 Paperback Availability: Usually ships within 24 hours |
Street Fighting Man is a fact-based book by Dennis Jones, who
grew up in Brooklyn in a typical lower-middle-class household
during the time that spanned the period from the birth of Rock
'n Roll through the "English invasion." Dennis tells the story
of how a young man and many of his neighborhood peers chose
music instead of the many temptations the city streets offered
(all bad), and how some of them "made it" to varying degrees of
success. Most were distracted enough to have time to grow up and
make mature choices in life and avoid the pitfalls that
surrounded them in 1960s and 70's Brooklyn.
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Brooklyn Noir
by Tim McLoughlin (Editor) List Price: Our Price: $10.85 You Save: $5.10 (32%) Paperback Availability: Usually ships within 24 hours |
It's all Brooklyn--Bensonhurst and Brighton Beach, Red Hook and
Crown Heights--in this atmospheric collection of noir tales. The
sound is right, too, from the understated staccato of old lost
souls to the jiving rap of younger ones. Abraham Pearl manages a
Jewish gumshoe in "Hasidic Noir," and Neal Pollack makes a
carousel ride and a scavenger hunt as sinister as midnight.
Thomas Morrissey does a weird tale of vampire cookies in "Can't
Catch Me." The language is richly foul, and so is much of the
sex in these 19 stories, divided into four sections from "Old
School Brooklyn" to "Cops & Robbers." Brooklyn's Italian and
Irish belly up to the bar with Russians, Puerto Ricans, and
Rastas. Pete Hamill, probably the biggest name here, opens with
a signature tale for both himself and the genre, deceptively
called "The Book Signing."
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Brooklyn Noir 2: The Classics
by Tim McLoughlin (Editor) List Price: Our Price: $10.85 You Save: $5.10 (32%) Paperback Availability: Usually ships within 24 hours |
On the heels of the stunning success of the award-winning
bestseller Brooklyn Noir, this second volume digs deeper into
the criminal history of New York's punchiest and most alluring
borough. Brooklyn Noir 2 offers short stories by the classic
authors who blazed the path for the success of the first volume,
which award-winning mystery author Laura Lippman called, "a
stunningly perfect combination . . . the writing is flat-out
superb, filled with lines that will sing in your head for a long
time to come."
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Brooklyn : Daily Eagle Postcards 1905-1907
by Richard L. Dutton List Price: Our Price: $13.59 You Save: $6.40 (32%) Paperback Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours |
Between 1905 and 1907, Brooklyn’s leading newspaper, the Daily
Eagle, published a remarkable series of almost five hundred
postcards, most with photographs of local scenes. Brooklyn in
that era was, as it is today, a place of great variety, with
imposing factories, sprawling riverfront sugar refineries,
scores of public schools, elaborate mansions, and hundreds of
blocks of middle-class brownstone row houses side by side with
public wood yards, free-floating baths, the county jail,
reformatories, and hospitals. Brooklyn was known as “the borough
of churches,” and grand religious edifices of all denominations
stood on nearly every corner. For recreation, there were social
clubs, acres of beautifully landscaped public parks graced by
statues of heroes of the past, and the teeming midways and
beaches of Coney Island. All of this is captured in Brooklyn:
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle Postcards 1905–1907.
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The Malbone Street Wreck
by Brian J. Cudahy List Price: Our Price: $18.00 You Save: $1.95 (10%) Paperback Availability: Delivery in 3 days or less |
On November 1, 1918, as the Great War in Europe was entering its
final hours, a five-car elevated train was heading for the
Flatbush section of Brooklyn with hundreds of homeward-bound
commuters aboard. As the train rumbled down a short hill between
Prospect Park and Ebbets Field in the very heart of Brooklyn,
the unthinkable happened: the motorman lost control and the
train left the tracks as it curved into a tunnel at the foot of
the hill. The ensuing disaster, known ever since as the Malbone
Street Wreck, took the lives of almost a hundred people and
stands as the worst mass-transit accident in U.S. history.
Fordham University Press is proud to present Brian Cudahy's
long-awaited account of the Malbone Street Wreck, a book that
recounts the events leading up to the disaster, describes the
fateful train trip from its beginning to its terrible end, and
reviews efforts conducted after the tragedy to fix blame and
establish liability.
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Amusing the Million : Coney Island at the Turn of the Century
by John F. Kasson Our Price: $14.00 Paperback Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 days |
"Because he treats our frivolities seriously, John Kasson has
produced an important book which helps us all understand
ourselves. His inquiry into the nature and significance of Coney
Island as part of the American experience provides a brilliant
device for understanding major transformations in American
culture at the turn of the century...A delight to read, look at,
and ponder...itself a great amusement for the mind."--Warren
Susman, Rutgers University
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Bruculinu, America : Remembrances of Sicilian-American Brooklyn, Told in Stories and Recipes
by Vincent Schiavelli Our Price: $24.00 Hardcover Availability: Delivery in 3 days or less |
Vincent Schiavelli's enchanting, sometimes deeply moving memoir
with recipes, Bruculinu, America, is a warmly recalled
distortion of Brooklyn, one of New York City's boroughs, as it
really was. As Schiavelli says, "The stories may not always
contain the strict facts, but they certainly tell the truth."
Don't be surprised if his beautiful reminiscence of the miracle
(which took place before he was born!) that saved his uncle
Salvatore Calogero from dying of pneumonia brings a tear to your
eye. Schiavelli, the familiar, droopy-eyed actor (Ghost,
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, etc.) who recently passed
away, evokes vivid and striking memories of Brooklyn of the past.
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Brushstrokes: A Work in Progress
by Siobhan Barry-Bratcher List Price: Our Price: $10.20 You Save: $4.80 (32%) Paperback Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours |
"Brushstrokes: A Work in Progress" is a memoir, a celebration of
childhood gone right and the foundation it creates. The first
half of the book traces the author's family history from her
parents' childhood years in Depression era Brooklyn, New York to
her own childhood in the mid 1950s and 1960s. The book then
returns to the 1990s where the middle-aged author finds positive
solutions for dealing with life in present-day New York by
drawing on her past experiences. She realizes that each person's
life is "a work in progress" whose finished product is unknown
even to the artist. This conclusion leads her to some unusual
and even humorous solutions as she attempts to create her own
reality and get the most from this lifetime.
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Praying for Gil Hodges : A Memoir of the 1955 World Series and One Family's Love of the Brooklyn Dodgers
by Thomas Oliphant List Price: Our Price: $16.47 You Save: $8.48 (34%) Hardcover Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours |
Driving over a bridge on an Indiana highway named after Hodges,
a star first baseman for the Brooklyn Dodgers, sets off a chain
of memories from the Dodgers' only World Series victory for
Oliphant. His memoir's main narrative thread is his recollection
of being allowed to skip school to watch Brooklyn take on the
Yankees in the seventh game of the 1955 Series with his father,
but the story takes a decidedly circuitous path; retellings of
Jackie Robinson's breaking of baseball's color line and other
significant moments in Dodger history appear between stories of
growing up in a small Manhattan apartment as the Oliphants coped
with the long-term effects of illnesses his father contracted
during WWII. The Pulitzer-winning columnist interviews the
pitchers for both teams, broadcaster Vin Scully and other
baseball fans of his generation. Although Oliphant spends
much—perhaps too much—time discussing baseball's glory years,
the more personal material distinguishes the memoir. At its
best, this isn't a book about baseball, but about a family that
found solace and comfort in the sport while making their way
through mid-century America.
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Brooklyn Remembered: The 1955 Days of the Dodgers
by Bob Costas (Foreword) and Maury Allen List Price: Our Price: $16.47 You Save: $8.48 (34%) Hardcover Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours |
In Brooklyn Remembered: The 1955 Days of the Dodgers, Allen has
captured the emotion, the drama and the sweet reverie of what
many baseball people and fans consider the greatest sports
triumph ever, the 1955 Brooklyn Series win over the Yankees. It
was the one and only Brooklyn championship for the team filled
with Hall of Famers like Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, Roy
Campanella, Duke Snider, Sandy Koufax and even fringe lefty
Tommy Lasorda. Two years after the title the team moved from
Brooklyn’s cozy Ebbets Field to laconic Los Angeles. This is
the stirring, funny, romantic, touching, historic story of one
team in one town in one time that has lasted across the decades.
The Brooklyn Dodgers of 1955 were an epic collection of talented
athletes and heroic men.
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The Fortress of Solitude
by Jonathan Lethem List Price: Our Price: $13.95 You Save: $1.00 (7%) Paperback Availability: Ships in 3 days or less |
This is the story of two boys, Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude. They
are friends and neighbors, but because Dylan is white and Mingus
is black, their friendship is not simple. This is the story of
their Brooklyn neighborhood, which is almost exclusively black
despite the first whispers of something that will become known
as "gentrification."
This is the story of 1970s America, a time when the most simple
human decisions—what music you listen to, whether to speak to
the kid in the seat next to you, whether to give up your lunch
money—are laden with potential political, social and racial
disaster. This is the story of 1990s America, when no one cared
anymore.
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The Greatest Ballpark Ever: Ebbets Field And The Story Of The Brooklyn Dodgers
by Bob McGee List Price: Our Price: $17.79 You Save: $9.16 (34%) Hardcover Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours |
Drawing on original interviews and letters, as well as published
and archival sources, The Greatest Ballpark Ever explores the
individual struggle of Charley Ebbets to build Ebbets Field, the
days of Wilbert Robinson’s early pennant winners, the era of the
Daffiness Boys, Larry MacPhail and the tumultuous field
leadership of Leo the Lip, Branch Rickey and the fiery triumph
of Jackie Robinson, the golden days of the Boys of Summer, and
Walter O’Malley’s ignominious departure. Memorable personalities
including Casey Stengel, Zach Wheat, Dazzy Vance, Babe Herman,
Van Lingle Mungo, Frenchy Bordargaray, Dolf Camilli, Pistol Pete
Reiser, Pee Wee Reese, Mickey Owen, Hugh Casey, and Cookie
Lavagetto are all here, as well as Oisk, Skoonj, Gil, Campy,
Newk, the Duke, and many more.
With humor and passion, The Greatest Ballpark Ever lets readers
relive a day in the raucous ballpark with its quirky angles and
its bent right-field wall, with the characters and events that
have become part of the nation’s folklore.
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Brooklyn: A State of Mind
by Michael W. Robbins and Wendy Palitz (Editors) List Price: Our Price: $13.57 You Save: $6.38 (32%) Paperback Availability: Usually ships within 24 hours |
BROOKLYN, the book, tells it all. Packed with the accent, the
attitude, the smarts, with nostalgia, respect, awe, laughter and
news, BROOKLYN taps into one of Brooklyn's best resources-its
army of writers-to tell the story of America's home town. For
over 250 years immigrants from all over the world have lived in
the neighborhood called Brooklyn, and fanned out to the rest of
the country. An 81 square mile patchwork of city, college town,
quiet fishing village, industrial center, bedroom community, and
seaport, Brooklyn is the Dodgers, Walt Whitman, Mrs. Stahl's
knishes, the bridge-and BROOKLYN, an obsessive and definitive
book that's as colorful, interesting, and quirky as the world it
celebrates. Fugehdabboudit!
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Old Brooklyn in Early Photographs, 1865-1929
by William Lee Younger List Price: Our Price: $10.85 You Save: $5.10 (32%) Paperback Availability: Usually ships within 24 hours |
157 photographs, many never before reprinted, show the vitality
and variety of old Brooklyn, Manhattan’s first suburb:
waterfront, Brooklyn Bridge, Fulton Street, Brooklyn Heights,
Ebbets Field, Gravesend Race Track, Sheepshead Bay, Manhattan
Beach Hotel, and more from the Long Island Historical Society
collection.
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A House on the Heights
by Truman Capote List Price: Our Price: $11.53 You Save: $5.42 (32%) Hardcover Availability: Usually ships within 24 hours |
The tranquil life Truman Capote led in the quiet enclave of
Brooklyn Heights in the 1950s and 1960s stood in sharp contrast
to the glittering scene he adored in Manhattan. Intimate and
wry, A House on the Heights vividly evokes the neighborhood that
Capote came to know well and described as one of Brooklyn’s
“splendid contradictions.” Its denizens, including a celebrated
Russian spy, a globe-trotting antiquarian, and a cat-rescuing
dowager with a pointed social agenda bring to life the Brooklyn
that cast its spell over Capote. In A House on the Heights he
meanders through a special time and place still recognizable today.
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A Picture History of the Brooklyn Bridge
by Mary J. Shapiro List Price: Our Price: $10.36 You Save: $2.59 (20%) Paperback Availability: Usually ships within 24 hours |
Profusely illustrated account of the greatest engineering
achievement of the 19th century. Rare contemporary photos and
engravings, accompanied by extensive, detailed captions, recall
construction, human drama, politics, much more. 167
black-and-white illustrations.
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Another Time Another Place
by Gerald Chatanow and Bernard D. Schwartz Our Price: $26.99 Paperback Availability: Ships in 3 days or less |
he Brownsville/East New York neighborhood of the 1930’s, 40’s
and 50’s is now but an almost faded memory, a "time warp" as it
were. Through the collective memories of the famous and the
not-so-famous, Jerry Chatanow and Bernie Schwartz have elicited
and chronicled a treasure trove of anecdotes and remembrances
that bring back to life a once vibrant and exhilarating
neighborhood. The authors vividly transport the reader back to a
bygone era of street games, egg creams, mello rolls and knishes,
patriotism at the home front, plush movie palaces, the Dodgers,
the Knicks, boxing venues, old time radio and the neighborhood
settlement houses with its open doors waiting to welcome the
teeming masses. This is a story told within the context of this
country’s transformation from "The Great Depression" to World
War Two to "Baby Boomer" prosperity. The authors were both
observers of and participants in what in retrospect proved to be
a triumphant generation.
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A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
by Betty Smith List Price: Our Price: $10.46 You Save: $3.49 (25%) Paperback Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours |
Francie Nolan, avid reader, penny-candy connoisseur, and adroit
observer of human nature, has much to ponder in colorful,
turn-of-the-century Brooklyn. She grows up with a sweet, tragic
father, a severely realistic mother, and an aunt who gives her
love too freely--to men, and to a brother who will always be the
favored child. Francie learns early the meaning of hunger and
the value of a penny. She is her father's child--romantic and
hungry for beauty. But she is her mother's child, too--deeply
practical and in constant need of truth. Like the Tree of Heaven
that grows out of cement or through cellar gratings, resourceful
Francie struggles against all odds to survive and thrive. Betty
Smith's poignant, honest novel created a big stir when it was
first published over 50 years ago. Her frank writing about
life's squalor was alarming to some of the more genteel society,
but the book's humor and pathos ensured its place in the realm
of classics--and in the hearts of readers, young and old.
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The Neighborhoods of Brooklyn
by Kenneth T. Jackson and John B. Manbeck List Price: Our Price: $13.57 You Save: $6.38 (32%) Paperback Availability: Usually ships within 24 hours |
This generously illustrated book takes us on a tour of the
ninety neighborhoods of Brooklyn, with their diverse ethnic
enclaves, abundance of architectural styles, and many churches
and festivals. For each neighborhood the book provides an essay,
street maps, practical tips, and fascinating facts. The
introduction gives an overview of Brooklyn, and an index allows
readers to locate key sites.
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The Brooklyn Follies
by Paul Auster List Price: Our Price: $16.32 You Save: $7.68 (32%) Paperback Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours |
Paul Auster's latest addition to his increasingly tender cycle
of love songs to Brooklyn is his most down-to-earth, sensuous,
and socially conscious novel to date. Harry Brightman, formerly
Harry Dunkel, which means dark, is a gay man who owns a used
bookstore in Brooklyn and previously served time for forgery.
Once a rogue, always a rogue? Auster's shrewd and charming
narrator, Nathan Glass, suspects so. A 59-year-old divorced
lung-cancer survivor retired from the life-insurance business
and estranged from his family, Nathan plans to sulk in Brooklyn.
Instead, he reconnects with his nephew, Tom, who works for
Harry. Tom is also depressed, and worried about his missing
sister, Aurora, when out of the blue, Aurora's eerily
self-possessed nine-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Lucy, appears.
As fate has its way with his irresistible characters, the
sorcerer-like Auster rhapsodizes about nature, orchestrates
unlikely love affairs and hilarious conversations, and considers
such extreme experiences as a life in pornography and marriage
to a tyrannical religious fanatic.
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Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir
by Doris Kearns Goodwin List Price: Our Price: $10.50 You Save: $3.50 (25%) Paperback Availability: Usually ships within 24 hours |
When historian Goodwin was six years old, her father taught her
how to keep score for "their" team, the Brooklyn Dodgers. While
this activity forged a lifelong bond between father and
daughter, her mother formed an equally strong relationship with
her through the shared love of reading. Goodwin recounts some
wonderful stories in this coming-of-age tale about both her
family and an era when baseball truly was the national pastime
that brought whole communities together. From details of
specific games to descriptions of players, including Jackie
Robinson, a great deal of the narrative centers around the
sport. Between games and seasons, Goodwin relates the impact of
pivotal historical events, such as the Rosenberg trial. Her end
of innocence follows with the destruction of Ebbets Field, her
mother's death, and her father's lapse into despair. Goodwin
gives listeners reason to consider what each of us has retained
of our childhood passions.
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