A memoir of growing up in a working-class Chicago neighborhood in the 1950s—an era the author remembers as “a good time to be a kid.”

This book represents a departure for Post (Global Brand Integrity Management, 2007, etc.), who has written 16 business textbooks.

Post’s straightforward prose never enchants, but it ably gets the job done, with each stand-alone chapter reminiscent of a grandfather’s perfectly told anecdote.

Norman Rockwell-esque nostalgia is tempered by everyday brutality: A street baseball game ends when a buddy’s arm is torn off in a hit-and-run accident, and Post watches as an injured puppy is “put down” by having its head smashed. A cast of recurring characters emerges: Uncle Stanley, a drunken vet broken by his service in World War II; Post’s father, an independent family man with little patience for religion; and Davie, a bully sent to reform school for setting a cat’s tail on fire.

Readers familiar with contemporary Chicago will also be treated to an extra, uncanny charm: a geography where place names remain the same but their characters have changed, as when Post’s sister describes North Avenue Beach as a modest spot for “people from the neighborhood”; today, it’s where the young and toned go to admire one another.

An earnest, occasionally shocking postcard from a vanished Chicago.