An Unlikely Hero: A Father's Struggle to Raise His Son in the Bronx During the Great Depression and the Golden Age of Radio Motion Pictures Comic Books Stickball Baseball and Prize Fights

An Unlikely Hero is set in a magical kingdom that no longer exists-the Bronx during the 1930s and 1940s. But the story really begins at the turn of the twentieth century when the hero arrives in America with his emigrant family and settles on the Lower East Side of New York. After running away from home at thirteen the hero acquires his education on the streets before joining the ranks of Americas new breed of ambitious salesmen who use the unparalleled growth of American business in the 1920s as a springboard to make their way in the world. For many years he leads a solitary hardscrabble life-until in 1928 at age forty-two he marries and settles down to raise a family. He manages to survive the Great Depression and with single-minded determination cares for his family and his sickly wife before her untimely death from cancer eleven years later. This is a story about tenacity; about survival; about a father who without a trace of rancor or self-pity rises to the occasion and forms a bond with his son based on working-class values and a bedrock of unspoken love. It is a clear-eyed unsentimental portrait of their years together and the fathers remarkable courage and stoicism in the face of unusual adversity. More than just a father he becomes the boys mentor and unlikely hero. Alternately heartbreaking and hilarious An Unlikely Hero is also a coming-of-age story about the heros teenage son growing up on the streets of the Bronx. The tale is told with an unerring sense of the time period that shaped the boys life-a life deeply marked by the death of his mother when he was six years old.