Word: boys
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...result, for much of the evening, he and most of my other friends were clustered in a section of the room physically detached from the dance floor. My friends, with one exception, are in their early 20s. The exception was the kid brother of two of my friends, a boy still in high school...
...BOY, am I going to enjoy the ECAC hockey tournament this weekend. It's not because I am an avid hockey fan, and it's not because Harvard is the top-ranked team in the nation. It's because I went through hell to get the tickets...
Near the end, the narrator of this riveting novel refers to all that has gone before as "this story of a boy's adventures." Some boy. Some adventures. Both are as far as they could be from innocent visions of Tom Sawyer or Horatio Alger. Even discounting a particularly bloody penultimate encounter, Billy Bathgate directly witnesses two murders and helps dispose of the body of a third victim. In each case, the perpetrator is the notorious gangster Dutch Schultz, ne Arthur Flegenheimer, Billy's self-described "mentor" and as romantically dangerous a father figure as any lad could desire. Billy...
...feels, initially, familiar. As in Ragtime (1975), this novel mingles fictional characters with historical ones: Schultz, Walter Winchell, Thomas E. Dewey. The setting combines Depression seediness and underworld glamour in a manner reminiscent of Loon Lake (1980). And this is not the first time Doctorow has written about a boy's coming of age in the Bronx; he did so in World's Fair (1985), even giving its made-up hero his own first name, Edgar. But the author is not simply repeating himself this time out. He is mixing elements from his other novels in a manner that proves...
...Doctorow's Billy Bathgate is the tale of a Bronx boy who comes under the vivid tutelage of a gangster named Dutch Schultz. Combustible reading...