The fascinating life of an Italian American icon. 
The mob couldn't live with Jimmy Roselli and it couldn't live without him. Roselli is Hoboken's other great singer, and to a greater degree than Frank Sinatra, Roselli maintained his ties to his old neighborhood and its people--indeed, he made a career of those ties. He's their link to their cultural heritage and Italy, and continues to sing a good half of his repertoire in Italian. But this didn't stop his wiseguy following from getting angry at him from time to time. 
"When I started singing big," Roselli told biographer David Evanier, "the tough guys were in the front row with the big cigars. They loved me so much they wanted to kill me. But their mothers and sisters and their wives wouldn't allow it." Roselli sang his best-loved song, "Little Pal," at John Gotti, Jr.'s wedding reception. Mobster Larry Gallo was buried with a Roselli record in his hands. "Hell of a guy," Roselli says of Gallo. "Nice, warm individual." 
Hoboken's unsung singer feuded with Sinatra, stood up to shakedown artists, befriended godfathers, and now has thirty-six recordings in print. A captivating story of a brilliant entertainer, Making the Wiseguys Weep is also a colorful portrait of Italian American culture from the 240 saloons that lined Hoboken's streets to the bright lights of New York City.

making-the-wiseguys-weep--the-jimmy-roselli-story

Biographies & Memoirs

David Evanier

Arts & Literature

METHUEN

The official tie-in to the major motion picture from Disney/Touchstone, starring John Travolta and directed by Gus Van Sant.The mob couldn't live with Jimmy Roselli and it couldn't live without him. Roselli is Hoboken's other great singer, and to a greater degree than Frank Sinatra, Roselli maintained his ties to his old neighborhood and its people -- indeed, he made a career of those ties. He's their link to their cultural heritage and Italy, and continues to sing a good half of his repertoire in Italian. But this didn't stop his wiseguy following from getting angry at him from time to time.When I started singing big, Roselli told biographer David Evanier, the tough guys were in the front row with the big cigars. They loved me so much they wanted to kill me. But their mothers and sisters and their wives wouldn't allow it. Roselli sang his best-loved song, Little Pal, at John Gotti, Jr.'s wedding reception. Mobster Larry Gallo was buried with a Roselli record in his hands. Hell of a guy, Roselli says of Gallo. Nice, warm individual.Hoboken's unsung singer feuded with Sinatra, stood up to shakedown artists, befriended godfathers, and now has thirty-six recordings in print, owns his own record company, and commands more than $100,000 a night in performance. And here, at last, is his fascinating life story.

Making the Wise Guys Weep

Humor & Entertainment

Bantam Books (Mm)

A desire for social justice interests the Rubells, a Depression era American couple, in Stalinism, and inadvertently leads them to be convicted of espionage for the Soviet Union and executed

Red Love

Literature & Fiction

Scribner

All the Things You Are

Turner Publishing

A sensitive, startling portrait of the legendary singer-timed to hit stores just as the Kevin Spacey movie Beyond the Sea has kindled intense new interest in every aspect of Darin's life and tragically early death.By age 8 Bobby Darin knew he was doomed to die young. So he set out to become a showbiz legend by age 25. From his Grammy-winning smash hit "Mack the Knife" to his Oscar-nominated supporting role in Captain Newman, M.D., Darin left his mark on every aspect of show business that he touched. Now, 32 years after his death at age 37, we finally have an elegantly written, multilayered portrait of this brash, gifted artist. Author David Evanier has:o Interviewed all the key principals in the Darin saga and culled rare photographs from the singer's closest friendso Pored through scores of videotapes, audiotapes, recordings, documents, and filmso Re-created the rock-and-roll and Broadway show-business milieus of the 1950s that Darin emerged from, and the sharply changing musical, political, and cultural world of the 1960s that had such a profound impact on him.The result is a moving, insightful portrait of one of the greatest-and most complex-performers in the history of American entertainment, whose restless voice and spirit seem as alive today as ever.

Roman Candle: The Life of Bobby Darin

Rodale Press

A brilliant tragicomedy based on the most infamous espionage trial of the 20th century. Thirty years after they walked hand in hand to the electric chair, sentenced to die for giving the gift of the atom bomb to the Soviet Union, Solomon and Dolores Rubell are the targets of a new investigation - conducted not by the FBI, or some paranoid Senate subcommittee, but by Gerald Lerner, boyhood Communist and author of such classic chronicles of the American Jewish experience as Hot Pastrami Sandwich and Kosher and Topless. What does Gerald hope to find, all these years later, by placing ads in the Jewish Daily Forward and Screw seeking former Soviet spies willing to chat? The short answer: His sanity. With a gleam in its eye and tenderness in its heart, David Evanier’s irreverent and incisive novel peers into one of the darkest chapters in American history - the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on charges of spying for the Soviet Union. Because, as Suzie Sizzle - great-niece of Dolly and Solly Rubell and star of a "goodly number" of hardcore films - explains to Gerald, this is not really a story about death, despite its gloomy ending. It is a story about love - the true love two proud Jewish underdogs had for each other, and the misguided love an entire generation of American leftists had for a political system whose grand promises masked terrible, irreconcilable truths. They say love will make you do crazy things. So, too, will Communism.

Literary

Audible Studios on Brilliance Audio

A whirling top most of his life, Michael Goldberg's world changes when his dying shrink bequeaths to him the tapes of thirty years of Michael s therapy sessions. The tapes give Michael a second chance in middle age: they unlock his life for him, as a gallery of absurd and touching characters, events and scenes spring out of his past: the shrink who cracks up and reverses roles with Michael when his wife dies and shows him naked pictures of his patients; the gay man who works for Jewish Punchers, a civil rights group, by day and the Harry Reems Defense Committee at night; a first love encountered again in desperate, ravaged middle age; a Communist Party leader who "would rather be a lamppost in Moscow than President of the United States;" a "glistening failure" of a father who is a cheerleader of Michael s defeat ("You can fail, Michael, if you try! I did it, why can t you?"); the fetish porn-drenched world of old Times Square; a Holocaust survivor Michael meets on September 11th who cannot confront his experience; a Hollywood of elderly Jewish moguls, scholarly and bizarre, "who seemed to have been shipped fresh to California like onion bagels or seeded bialys"-- men like Michael s mentor, Julius Birnbach, creator of the cult classic, "The Curse of the Evil Midgets." Entering into a marriage stemming from a suicide, by the end, the marriage turns into a love story as Michael reclaims his life. The Great Kisser becomes a story of gratitude--of many kisses--by its climax.

The Great Kisser

Contemporary

Rager Media

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Books by David Evanier

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

making-the-wiseguys-weep--the-jimmy-roselli-story

Making the Wise Guys Weep

Red Love

All the Things You Are

Roman Candle: The Life of Bobby Darin

Red Love

The Great Kisser