Word: breslin
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...Books Jimmy Breslin works the New York City streets for Table Money. The Book of Abraham follows a family for 80 generations...
Booze is the thematic undercurrent of Jimmy Breslin's fifth novel, a brutal slab of working-class life set among the Irish in the New York City borough of Queens. This is where Breslin learned his own trade as a newspaperman, reporting on the ways and means of the Archie Bunker set. His headlong bowling-ball prose can currently be found in the New York Daily News, where he is a Pulitzer-prizewinning columnist. There, as here, Breslin's lack of subtlety is his greatest strength. His characters are undereducated, abusive and conflicted by feelings of pride and shame. Table...
...many. Sometimes Owney sleeps it off overnight in the hog house, the dressing room at the construction site. This does not please his wife Dolores, who wants to study medicine but is stuck at home with a baby. Dolores is a latter-day stereotype and one that Breslin is less sure of than he is of the guys and dolls along Queens Boulevard. Still, she is vital and feisty enough to make his point about the gulf between blue-collar men and their women...
Hanging laundry is not a bad analogy for the way Breslin works. His book relies less on plot than on the cumulative effect of colorful anecdotes flapping on a slack story line. There are tales of the old sod, immigration and Boss Tweed's New York. The first male Morrison in the U.S. walks off the boat in 1870 and is put right to work sandhogging for 75¢ a day plus three hots and a cot. He soon discovers that he is restricted to the construction camp because the nearby Hudson River town of Beacon, N.Y., does not want muddy...
Agents and directors look for unaffected kids with the gift of not minding being looked at. "I only respond to natural, and then what I do is enhance," says agent Meredith Fine, who represents Haley Joel Osment (an Oscar nominee for The Sixth Sense) and the Breslin siblings Spencer (The Cat in the Hat) and Abigail (Signs). "They have to have some innate ability. It's like, if you're going to take ice-skating lessons, you have to have good balance or you're going...