bronx (new york, n.y.)

The author, a Rhodes scholar and combat veteran, analyzes factors that influenced him as well as another man of the name and from the same neighborhood who was drawn into a life of drugs and crime and ended up serving life in prison, focusing on the influence of relatives, mentors, and social expectations that could have led either of them on different paths.

A memoir of the author's childhood in the Bronx during World War II, where his father was an air-raid warden and made fur-lined vests for the Navy, and his mother, a Russian immigrant, became a poker dealer to a cicle of powerful Bronx politicians who dealt in the blackmarket.

A novel about a Puerto Rican woman brought up in the South Bronx and her struggles to break the cycle of poverty and oppression which has plagued her family for generations.

The author, a Rhodes scholar and combat veteran, analyzes factors that influenced him as well as another man of the name and from the same neighborhood who was drawn into a life of drugs and crime and ended up serving life in prison, focusing on the influence of relatives, mentors, and social expectations that could have led either of them on different paths.