Memoir of the Bookie's Son - Hardcover

Offit, Sidney

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312131402 ISBN 13: 9780312131401

Publisher: St Martins Pr, 1995

Synopsis

When he witnessed his father's fierce resistance to a gang of kidnappers, Sidney Offit became aware that his family was different. All he knew about his father's work was learned during those evenings when his father would say to his mother, "I got action, honey, so don't tie up the telephone." "Action" became synonymous with his father's occupation, and "parlay the winner," the most frequent of his father's terse responses, was what young Sidney determined his father's business was all about.
By the end of Buck Offit's life - he lived to be ninety-six - his shoeboxes of fifty- and one-hundred-dollar bills, banked in the hollow walls of the family apartment, were gone. But the self-defined bookie - a classic American existentialist - went right on picking winners and insisting, "Life don't owe me nothin'."
In this slim, elegant memoir, Sidney Offit - novelist, teacher, and curator of one of the nation's most prestigious journalism awards - explores, with warmth and humor, the complexities of this extraordinary father-son relationship.

About this title

About the Author:

Sidney Offit is an adjunct professor at New York University and a member of the faculty of the New School.

From Publishers Weekly:

The apple fell far from the tree in Baltimore's Offit family, where son Sidney became a college teacher, author and TV commentator, quite unlike his father?a bookie. This affectionate reminiscence of Barney ("Buckley" or "Buck"), who died in 1992 at age 96, portrays a man "relentlessly realistic, devoid of self-pity, unsentimental," tough enough to beat up Mafia goons and shrewd enough to pay for a way out of his trial for breaking gambling laws, something that still seems to bother his son. Although their son seems to be trying to put some moral distance between himself and his parents, both Buck and wife Lily, who backed his career choice to the hilt, appear to have been wonderful people. This slender volume with large type and few lines per page resembles an overblown magazine article.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: St Martins Pr
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0312131402
• ISBN 13: 9780312131401
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 165