Eisenhower, My Eisenhower

Charyn, Jérome

HOLT. RINEHART AND WINSTON

Saigon Sarah lives in a rented Hebrew school and struggles to survive the harsh conditions of the Lower East Side of New York City

War Cries over Avenue C

Literature & Fiction

Penguin??Books

This riveting study of Joe DiMaggio offers a more sympathetic look at his life beyond the baseball field, a reversal of how the legendary sports icon has been portrayed in recent years As the New York Yankees' star centerfielder from 1936 to 1951, Joe DiMaggio is enshrined in America's memory as the epitome in sports of grace, dignity, and that ineffable quality called "class." But his career after retirement, starting with his nine-month marriage to Marilyn Monroe, was far less auspicious. Writers like Gay Talese and Richard Ben Cramer have painted the private DiMaggio as cruel or self-centered. Now, Jerome Charyn restores the image of this American icon, looking at DiMaggio's life in a more sympathetic light.
DiMaggio was a man of extremes, superbly talented on the field but privately insecure, passive, and dysfunctional. He never understood that for Monroe, on her own complex and tragic journey, marriage was a career move; he remained passionately committed to her throughout his life. He allowed himself to be turned into a sports memorabilia money machine. In the end, unable to define any role for himself other than "Greatest Living Ballplayer," he became trapped in "a horrible kind of minutia." But where others have seen little that was human behind that minutia, Charyn in Joe DiMaggio presents the tragedy of one of American sports' greatest figures.

Joe DiMaggio: The Long Vigil (Icons of America)

Biographies & Memoirs

Historical

Yale University Press

How to describe Faigele? A recent immigrant from Russia, the wife of an immigrant fur worker, a mother, a housewife, a greenhorn - and an enchantress of such striking beauty that she had the Bronx at her feet. The local postmaster consoled her with hot tea in his office every morning when she came with "Baby" Jerome, hoping for a letter from her brother in war-torn Russia. An admirer enlisted five-year-old Baby to help him produce a forged letter to ease her worry. But it was her dentist, a blackmarketer on the side, who introduced her to the circle of Bronx politicians who made her the dealer of their weekly poker game. Beautiful, passionate, worlds above words like "naive or sophisticated," Faigele has been blessed by her son, a rarely gifted writer who vividly recaptures this astonishing woman in her turbulent setting.

The Dark Lady from Belorusse: A Memoir

Arts & Literature

St Martins Pr

What does an eleven-year-old boy do when his classmates call him "Dumbo" and his parents don't seem to knew that he exists? His mother, the beautiful Faigele, spends her days pushing her two-year-old son Marvin around in a stroller and barely hears Jerome's clarinet playing. The answer for Jerome Charyn is to go to the local movie house and hide out for a few hours every day. At the movies, he can escape and not be himself for a little while. One day, while watching Samson and Delilah for the seventh time that week, he is suddenly grabbed from his seat and dragged down a flight of stairs, where he winds up being introduced to a whole new way of life by three "cellar rats," as Jerome likes to call them. They make him a part of their group and he soon finds himself dressed in a Feuerman &amp; Marx suit collecting money for Farouk, the local gangster. Many of the men remember his mother, the Dark Lady, from her days as dealer of their neighborhood poker game.

The Black Swan: A Memoir

Jerome Charyn's three-part memoir of his boyhood in the Bronx has all the imagery and color of an enchanting and entertaining novel -- someone has said that it captures the author's world so accurately that it can't possibly be true. Bronx Boy, like The Dark Lady of Belorusse and The Black Swan, both selected by The New York Times as Notable Books of the Year, is a tour de force of memory and imagination. In this third and final installment, the higher truths of a masterly writer's art render moot the question of exactly where the real world ends and Charyn's imagined world begins. Still known as "Baby" although a younger brother has come along, young Charyn makes pocket money delivering eggs, belongs to a group of 12-year-old wannabe gangsters that meet in a soda shop run by an ex-con, and spends afternoons telling stories to the adoring wife of a wealthy Russian émigré. He becomes famous for his black-and-tans -- a concoction of coffee ice cream, seltzer, milk, chocolate sauce, crushed pecans -- and "a touch of bitterness that may have been the Bronx." So famous, indeed, that he walks away the winner of an annual black-and-tan contest sponsored by the real-life top gangster called "The Little Man" -- Meyer Lansky. In Charyn's hands, the often ridiculed Bronx is a magic place, as full of odd and wonderful characters as a three-ring circus. And at the center of it all, young "Baby," not as lucky in love as he would like to be, drinking it all in, putting his own extraordinary take on it. Charyn looks back at this with his singular vision, and records it all for us with the skill of the fine writer he is. This is a delightful and often moving story of a childhood that could only have been lived in New York in the fifties, a New York experience that could only have taken place in the Bronx of those days, a growing-up saga that could only have been captured by this singular author.

Bronx Boy: A Memoir

Reference & Collections

Thomas Dunne Books

Set in a shocking New York underworld populated by a constellation of punks, low lifes, thugs, nymphs, vice lords and bag men, Marilyn The Wild is the first book in Jerome Charyn's classic Isaac Quartet. Issac Sidel is the toughest, hardest, most incorruptible police officer in the business, and he runs the meanest kingdom in New York City - the Lower East Side. But his biggest problem is his daughter - Marilyn the Wild. A tough-talking Bronx-Manhattan girl - twice-divorced by twenty five - Marilyn has a taste for the wrong men. And Manfred 'Blue Eyes' Coen, Isaac Sidel's handsome sidekick and spy, is just that sort of man. So when a vindictive teenage gang makes Marilyn the target in a crazed vendetta against her father, the stakes are high for both Isaac and Blue Eyes.

Marilyn the Wild

AVON BOOKS @

It is May, 1944. An ordinary sailor named Oliver Beebe, a handsome man with a head full of eyebrows, arrives at the White House to cut the Presidents hair, and quickly, mysteriously, becomes a live-in, full-time companion and confidant to the Chief Executive. An odd nimbus surrounds the young man. The president has installed him in the attic of the White House, he comes and goes from FDRs bedroom without knocking, he is the only man who seems to be able to bridge the warring camps surrounding Eleanor and FDR.Reporters and newsmen of the nation interview and probe, but they can find no clue to the secret of Oliver Beebe. The Secret Service digs into his past, but they can only come up with questions: What is Beebes strange relationship with his sister? Why does he go to meetings of the Fascist organization called The Liberty Club? What is the basis of his remarkable friendship with J. Edgar Hoover? As the security forces watch in frustration, the President, increasingly dependent on young Oliver, and caught up first in his election battle against Tom Dewey and then with Stalin and Churchill at Yalta, remains oblivious to his own and the nations jeopardy. What happens then, and how, is more than historic.

Franklin Scare

AVON.

Provides a personal look at New York and its crime, art world, homeless, celebrities, ethnic groups, and business leaders

Metropolis: New York As Myth, Marketplace, and Magical Land

Avon/Books

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Books by Charyn, Jérome

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Charyn, Jérome. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Eisenhower, My Eisenhower

War Cries over Avenue C

Joe DiMaggio: The Long Vigil (Icons of America)

Joe DiMaggio: The Long Vigil (Icons of America)

The Dark Lady from Belorusse: A Memoir

The Black Swan: A Memoir

Bronx Boy: A Memoir

Marilyn the Wild

Franklin Scare

Metropolis: New York As Myth, Marketplace, and Magical Land