Word: brooklyn
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...this autobiographical screed, Dershowitz begins with a childhood in an Orthodox Jewish section of Brooklyn. The boy was too secular for Talmudic scholarship, but he proved to be a stubborn and flashy debater. A fellow student appraised him: Alan "has a mouth of Webster and a head of Clay." The mouth went on to Yale Law School, where he ranked first in his class, yet found himself locked out of prominent legal firms because of "the world of bigotry, discrimination, racism, and anti-Semitism called the American...
...Right Thing had critics predicting that the film would foment wildings by blacks against whites. Racial violence did erupt in Brooklyn's Bensonhurst neighborhood that summer, but the victim was a black man, Yusuf Hawkins, whose murder inspired Jungle Fever. "He was killed for supposedly coming to visit ((a young Italian-American woman))," Lee notes, "when all he wanted to do was look at a used car. But sex and racism have always been tied together. Look at the thousands of black men who got lynched and castrated. The reason the Klan came into being was to protect white Southern...
...rancor. Her architect husband, Flipper Purify (Wesley Snipes), has wandered into the sexual curiosity of his Italian- American secretary, Angie Tucci (Annabella Sciorra). Their affair, which they confide to friends, is soon the talk -- the shout -- of their respective neighborhoods, Sugar Hill in Harlem and Bensonhurst in Brooklyn. The animosities are mirrored in two subplots. Angie's sweet, nerdy friend Paulie (John Turturro) pursues a romance with a classy black woman (Tyra Ferrell). And Flipper's crackhead brother (Samuel L. Jackson) collides with his Bible- bred parents (Ossie Davis and Ruby...
Tired of watching friends and relatives fall prey to drugs, crime and other social maladies that ravaged the Red Hook section of Brooklyn where he grew up, Matty Rich decided to fight back. His weapon: a movie camera. "I wasn't interested in film because I loved film or some director," says the 19-year- old director of Straight Out of Brooklyn. "I was angry that everybody around me got destroyed, and I wanted to show that everyday struggle...
...subject, let it be Baseball in '41 by Robert W. Creamer (Viking; $19.95). A veteran sportswriter now pushing 70, Creamer artfully weaves his own 1941-college-boy-on-the-cusp-of -war persona throughout the narrative. There are wonderful asides, ranging from Red Barber's early days as the Brooklyn Dodgers radio announcer to the draft woes of Detroit Tigers star Hank Greenberg. But hard as Creamer tries, I never caught the magic of the 1941 games themselves. For how could they compete with the joys of a simpleminded slugfest on ESPN...