The Water Is Wide
By: Pat Conroy
Dial Press Trade Paperback; Reprint edition (October 2002)
320 pages

The Water Is Wide is the autobiographical account of Pat Conroy’s year of teaching on Daufuskie Island. An “educated” white man going to teach in an isolated black community in the rural south (in 1964) goes about as well as you think it would. But conflict between Conroy and the community disappears in an instant. They grow to love each other dearly. And about that time, the true villain of the book is revealed – the school administration.

Two of my favorite quotes:

My pre-Yamacraw theory of teaching held several sacred tenets, among these being that the teacher must always maintain an air of insanity, or of eccentricity out of control, if he is to catch and hold the attention of his students. The teacher must always be on the attack, looking for new ideas, changing worn-out tactics, and never, ever falling into patterns that lead to student ennui. Bernie and I both believed in teacher dramatics, gross posturings and frenzied excesses to get a rise out of dead-head, thought-killed students, who daily sat before us like shoed mushrooms. The master of clowns, Bernie could twist his face into a thousand contortions to get kids to laugh with or at him. Bernie would tell me, “Boy, keep them laughing. Make them laugh so damn hard and so damn loud that they don’t realize they are learning.” My tactics were different. I concentrated on variety as the primary method. Sweet talk, Shakespearean monologues, Marine Corps brutality, prayers—anything that could possibly inflame the imagination, even momentarily, of someone imprisoned in my classroom all day.

How could I compare or relate my childhood to growing up on Yamacraw? My mother’s reading to me each night was a celebration of language and tradition, a world of Mother Goose and lyric poetry, where Bobby Shaftoe goes to sea and intrepid, prepubic heroes stand on burning decks. My youth was a glut of words, a circus of ideas nurtured by parents dedicated to diplomas and the production of professionals from the tribe of children they sired. My youth sang the glory of books, the psalms of travel, of new faces, of the universe of Disney animation, of Popsicle sticks and county fairs, of parables of war spoken by a flight-jacketed father, of parables of love and Jesus sung by a blue-eyed mother, a renegade Baptist, a converted Catholic, a soldier of the Lord.

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The Last Pirate Of New York: A Ghost Ship, a Killer, and the Birth of a Gangster Nation
By: Rich Cohen
Spiegel & Grau (June 4, 2019)
234 pages

The Last Pirate Of New York is a fantastic prequel to Cohen’s first book, Tough Jews. While Tough Jews tells the story of Murder Inc. and the five New York mob families in their heyday, The Last Pirate Of New York answers the question: Who was the original New York gangster anyway? I especially enjoyed the twist about half-way through this volume. I don’t want to give it all away, but Albert Hicks was no criminal neophyte.

Two of my favorite quotes:

As soon as I was old enough, I moved to New York. I said I was looking for a job, but I had really come in search of the truth behind my father’s stories. This became my career. Parents: be careful what you tell your children at night. I explored the parts of the city where I knew the old-time gangsters had operated: Little Italy and the Lower East Side, East New York and Brownsville, Brooklyn, the piers that had been the heart of the old Fourth Ward. I was consumed by New York history—not the story of marble buildings and glad-handing mayors but the alternate story that ran parallel and beneath—the story of the underworld, its heroes and stool pigeons, founders and visionaries.

With him, the pirate turned into the gangster: he emerged onto dry land and took up in bars and casinos—Blackbeard morphing into Al Capone. Hicks became infamous during New York gangland’s prehistory. Writing about him, reporters created a basic underworld type. He was the first swamp angel, the great-grandfather of every mob punk and Bowery psycho who would follow.

Buy this book.