After many years of talking about it and promising our kids and our relatives that we'd do it, it's finally done. The book, Almost Golden, by my brother John and me, has finally been published and is available for sale on the web.
It's a memoir of our early years growing up in a section of the North Bronx-- an area that bears no resemblance to the stereotypical image of “Da Bronx" most people seem to have.
Our Bronx didn't have any gangs, or drugs, or even any poverty. We lived in an idyllic little neighborhood known as “Country Club Road" on the shores of Pelham Bay. It was inhabited by families who's breadwinners were firemen, lawyers, pipe-fitters, doctors, plumbers, and carpenters. John and I lived there at a time when anything still seemed possible in America. The world war was over and things like television and 3-D movies and filtered cigarettes and airplanes that could fly all the way to Rome without stopping were all just beginning to happen.
As kids, my brother and I were swept up in this wave of optimism that seems from our current perspective to never quite have reached its full potential.
Being five years apart, John and I lived relatively separate lives in those early years. But as adults we found we had a great deal more in common than we'd thought. Our memories of that Country Club Road existence were vivid and surprisingly similar as we recounted them to our own kids.
We decided to write it all down, not by sitting at a desk together, but by each writing about some of our favorite and most memorable moments. What emerged was a series of stories about things like raucous VJ Day celebrations, crazy uncles who put cigarettes out on their tongues to amuse the kids, and loopy aunts who sang opera, rodeo riders, egg creams, Gertrude Ederly, snowy Christmases, fabulous Italian meals, and even the infamous Army/McCarthy Hearings.
The reception to Almost Golden so far has been great. People who also grew up in that era and even people who did not grow up in the Bronx find lots to relate to; while younger readers are often amazed at how different life was just a half-a-generation ago.
As I say in the introduction to our book, “I think nostalgia is a very over-used and underrated emotion. It's a way of getting back parts of your life you thought had disappeared forever. I guess you could say it's a way of living twice."
If you'd like to purchase a copy of Almost Golden, you can do so from Infinity Press by going to bbotw.com.
ISBN: 0-7414-3017-7 2006
Price: $14.95
Book Size: 5.5 x 8.5, 194 pages
Category/Subject: Autobiography/Personal Memoir
About the Authors
Rob Mariani is a freelance advertising copywriter who moved from New York City to New England in 1967. His ad work has earned him numerous awards for creativity, and he is the on-line author of a number of essays on famous jazz musicians for allaboutjazz.com. His articles on travel have been published in the Providence Journal, and his short fiction in Rosebud Magazine, The Southern Anthology, and The Newport Review. He also writes a weekly restaurant column for findri.com. Rob has his B.A. in English Literature from Fordham University. He lives in Bristol, Rhode Island with his wife Jan and has two daughters, Nicole and Jennifer.
John Mariani is the author of seven books, including, with his wife Galina, The Italian-American Cookbook and America Eats Out. He is an award-winning columnist for Esquire, Diversion, and Bloomberg News and publisher of Mariani's Virtual Gourmet Newsletter, and his work has appeared on scores of journals over the past three decades. John received his B.A. from Iona College and is Ph.D. from Columbia University in English Literature. He lives in Tuckahoe, NY with his wife and sons, Misha and Christopher.
Almost Golden is the collaborative memoir of two third-generation Italian-American brothers who grew up in the section of the North Bronx known as “Country Club" during the 1940's and early '50's. It revisits a bucolic Bronx on the shores of Pelham Bay--a Bronx with snowy white Christmases, swashbuckling uncles, 25-cent movie serials, egg creams, loopy aunts, even cowboys. It was an idyllic enclave that few people ever knew about in a post-War America when the future seemed to be pure gold.
For more information contact All About Jazz.
