Table Money
A Novel
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
As a city worker and former war hero tumbles into alcoholism, his wife fights to hold on to her newfound freedom
Owney Morrison has walked the catacombs underneath New York City since he was eleven. His father was a sandhog—a tunnel worker—and the first to introduce him to the miles of passageways snaking beneath the ground.
Now an adult, back from Vietnam with a Medal of Honor and no work prospects, Owney takes up the family legacy, digging and maintaining the tunnels that provide the city with water. It is dangerous work, and at the end of each shift he deserves a few drinks. But when alcohol takes control of him, his wife Dolores is left with a decision. Should she take her baby daughter and cut ties with her husband, or stay and risk being dragged under by a man who feels safest one hundred feet below the street?
At once witty and moving, Table Money is a memorable portrait of family and marriage in modern America.
This ebook features an illustrated biography of Jimmy Breslin including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author's personal collection.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
By the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and author (Table Money, The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight), this funny, gutsy "fable'' treats harsh truths with bitter irony. The grim comedy begins when orders from the Vatican send Fr. Cosgrove from his post in Africa to stamp out sin (i.e., illicit sex) in America. With his companion Great Big, a sometimes backsliding former cannibal, the priest arrives in New York City, where he learns about real sin. Through Baby Rock, a young black boy who befriends them, Cosgrove and Great Big become involved with the city's homeless and hungry, victims of ``public assistance,'' and soon all hell breaks loose in Manhattan. There is hardly time to gasp between the swift developments, when the missionary and hungry Great Big declare war on all the exploiters of the have-nots: the pious rich types who pretend to help the poor, the bureaucratic flunkies who euchre welfare clients out of sustenance, even the Mafia. The dialogue is straight on and mean, the ethnic types funny and recognizable, with the feel of the city throbbing between the lines. This is Breslin at his bestpurely unbeatable. BOMC selection.
