Five-Finger Discount

March 1, 2001
"The night my grandfather tried to kill us, I was five years old, the age I stopped believing in Santa Claus, started kindergarten, and made real rather than imaginary friends." This chatty and often engaging memoir of growing up among a rogue's gallery of tough characters may leave readers thinking Stapinski might have been better off with an imaginary family. Reminiscent of Michael Patrick McDonald's highly praised All Souls: A Family Story from Southie, but without that book's overwhelming moral force, this is the sad, often funny story of Stapinski's extended family of grifters, con men and women and petty crooks. At its best, it's a vivid portrait of working-class life in Jersey City, N.J. But too often it veers uneasily between disarming anecdotes (Stapinski's grandfather steals books from the public library where he works as a security guard) and terrifying details of lives out of control (her father almost loses his legs because of untreated but obvious diabetes), and doesn't sustain dramatic intensity. Stapinski, who has written for the New York Times and New York magazine, can be funny--as in her descriptions of attending New York University, where she meets Jews, punks and lesbians, and reads the Village Voice--and even illuminating, as when she describes the Machiavellian, if mundane, workings of the multitude of patronage systems that have corrupted Jersey City politics. Though she has a good eye for the details of family and community life, too often the emotions in this memoir feel imagined, not real.

November 1, 2000
Most of us brag on our illustrious forebears, but journalist Stapinsky takes a different tack, drawing on the bookies, swindlers, cheats, and even murderers in her colorful past to paint a "crooked family history."

Copyright 2000 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from January 1, 2001
This is certainly not the run-of-the-mill memoir that's being cranked out these days, and what sets it apart from the others are two things: it takes place in Jersey City, New Jersey, a place with such a history of corruption that if it didn't exist, Dashiell Hammett would have had to make it up; and the Stapinski family on both sides seem to embody the Jersey City ethos. There's even a bit of it in the author herself, the toughness, that is, not the corruption. Anyway, Stapinski's relatives seemed to have run the gamut from killers and maniac street punks to bookies, embezzlers, and swagsters. (The goods that "fall off the truck" are called swag; the guy into whose arms it just happens to drop is a swagster.) She draws some memorable portraits of many of her family members, especially her parents and her great-aunt Katie, and an especially haunting one of her maternal grandfather, a man who was probably better off in jail than out. But the family, while it is the main story, is not the only one, and the various corrupt politicians she describes give you a lesson in how municipal government is not supposed to work.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2001, American Library Association.)