BRONX BOY: A Memoir
Jerome Charyn, . . St. Martin's/Dunne, $22.95 (192pp) ISBN 978-0-312-27810-6
By age 14, Jerome "Baby" Charyn had been hired by Jewish gangster Meyer Lansky to mix ice cream sodas. He'd established an on-again, off-again relationship with a gang headed by a heroin addict and pimped for the gang leader's girlfriend. He was familiar with Flaubert and Dostoyevski. He'd helped his blind mother (who looked like Joan Crawford) to deal a better hand of poker and, as a pimp, earned a better salary than his father (who looked like Clark Gable). Charyn, the author of more than 30 books, mostly fiction, writes this final installment of his three-part memoir (after
Reviewed on: 03/25/2002
Genre: Nonfiction