The Bookmaker

June 30, 2008
In the 1960s, the author's parents seemed poised to join the exodus of Italian-American families from New York to the suburbs. Instead, thanks to the chronic gambling debts of his father, Hugo, a city welfare bureaucrat who ran an illicit sports-betting operation on the side, they wound up in the Bronx—at the vast Coop City housing project that became a watchword for urban anomie. Ignoring overdue bills and eviction notices, his parents insisted the family partake of the finer things—books, museums, opera, European vacations—all financed by bad checks and fast talking. Journalist Agovino, with an apparently verbatim recall of long, colorful conversations from decades past, paints a loving, picaresque portrait of his youth and the tension between his mother's yearning for middle-class stability and his father's faith in the big score. He sets it amid an elegy for a white, ethnic New York—the old-country foods, the lovable wise guys—that expired in Coop City's windswept Le Corbusierian sterility. Unfortunately, the author's family seems more eccentric than iconic, and Agovino's narrative, meandering from Caribbean travelogue to summer food-service jobs, doesn't impart much shape to their sociocultural journey. Photos.

August 1, 2008
Despitethe title, this is no gambling memoir. Agovinos tale is that of a second-generation Italian American growing up in the diverse and evolving Bronx of the 1970s and 80s. His fathers bookmaking business serves as a binding agent for the struggles and triumphs throughout Agovinos young life. Identity plays a key role as Agovino embraces the nascent hip-hop community while yearning for mainstream acculturation; his love of Middle America resides in the belief that they were real Americans. Juxtapositions abound throughout, courtesy of the success and failures of the bookmaking business. A successful season meant the difference between a tour of Europe and missed rent payments. These ebbs and flows, compounded by public housing in the Bronx, drive the memoir. For Agovino and his family, life does not build toward a crescendo. It grows exponentially, then subsides, puttering along, waiting for that next spurt. Throughout it all, family is there. A nicestory of an individual coping with a unique situation yet always buttressed by family.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)