The Bookmaker: A Memoir of Money, Luck, and Family from the Utopian Outskirts of New York City – A Son's Portrait of His Father's Gambling and the Struggle for Success

by Michael J. Agovino

Marking the debut of a gifted new writer, The Bookmaker teems with humanity, empathy, humor, and insight.

At the heart of Michael J. Agovino's powerful, layered memoir is his family's struggle for success in 1970s, '80s, and '90s New York City—and his father's gambling, which brought them to exhilarating highs and crushing lows. He vividly brings to life the Bronx, a place of texture and nuance, of resignation but also of triumph.

The son of a buttoned-up union man who moonlighted as a gentleman bookmaker and gambler, Agovino grew up in the Bronx's Co-op City, the largest and most ambitious state-sponsored housing development in U.S. history. When it opened, it landed on the front page of The New York Times and in Time magazine, which described it as "relentlessly ugly."

Agovino's Italian American father was determined not to let his modest income and lack of a college education define him, and was dogged in his pursuit of the finer things in life. When the point spreads were on his side, he brought his family to places he only dreamed about in his favorite books and films: the Uffizi, the Tate, the Rijksmuseum; St. Peter's, Chartres, Teotihuacán. With bad luck came shouting matches, unpaid bills, and eviction notices.

The Bookmaker is both a bold, loving portrait of a family and their metropolis and an intimate look into some of the most turbulent decades of New York City. In elegant and soaring prose, it transcends the personal to illuminate the ways in which class distinctions shaped America in the last half of the twentieth century.

Genres: Nonfiction

371 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Michael J. Agovino is the author of "The Bookmaker: A Memoir of Money, Luck, and Family From the Utopian Outskirts of New York City" (HarperCollins, 2008) and "The Soccer Diaries: An American's Thirty-Year Pursuit of the International Game" (University of Nebraska Press, 2014/18). He is a former editor at Esquire magazine and has written for The New York Times, The Village Voice, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Republic, The New York Observer, Pitchfork, GQ, The Wall Street Journal, Elle, and many others.

In “The Bookmaker,” The Wall Street Journal wrote, “Mr. Agovino has crafted a sensitive and engrossing memoir....All of the characters in The Bookmaker are extraordinarily vivid, thanks in part to the author's uncanny ear for the accents and cadences of New Yorkers of every stripe.” The Washington Post wrote: “Agovino brings a gift for capturing urban sounds and symbols and a keen sense of shifting social status to his memoir of growing up in the Bronx,” while The New York Times said it was “a charming, evocative memoir about growing up a generation ago in Co-op City, the Bronx....‘The Bookmaker’ is delightfully ironic...an engaging story.” The book was also favorably featured on The Today Show, in New York Magazine, Vanity Fair, The New York Observer, The Brooklyn Rail, The New York Post, and many others.

“The Soccer Diaries" was described by Esquire Magazine as “funny and affecting” and the novelist Colum McCann wrote that it was “intimate and wonderfully written” while Hampton Sides said that it was a “delightful, briskly readable memoir of sports obsession that deftly cuts across decades and cultures.” The book was also featured on BBC America with Katty Kay and many other U.S. and international outlets. Booklist wrote: “Agovino clearly wants to make his own contribution to the canon, and now he has one, a thoughtful and enjoyable narrative of his passion for the game.”

His essays have also been included in the anthologies "Conversations With Albert Murray" (University of Mississippi Press, 1997); "Best American Sports Writing 2003" (Houghton Mifflin); and "Fathers & Sons & Sports" (Random House/ESPN Books, 2008).

Reviews

[Amantha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating portrait of life in NYC with a focus on the Bronx from 1930s to 90s

[Landa]

great social history of Co-op City in New York in the 70's

[Jules Nadeau · Rating 5 out of 5]

Having discovered and enjoyed Agovino’s "The Soccer Diaries" I wanted to prolong the pleasure by reading his first title: "The Bookmaker". Oh boy! So much fun that I changed gears to 'slow read'. The author has such a keen sense of observation and he expresses his intimate thoughts with art and finesse!

"The Bookmaker" is a chronicle of his resourceful and imaginative father Hugo Agovino, son of Italian immigrants, who indulges in gambling but considers his activities a respected occupation: "I'm good for the economy." The son Michael writes: "For my father, gambling and bookmaking were a second job, his clandestine second life... his main source of hope and of despair... Baseball was the greatest game invented, but baseball only brought us financial misery."

It's not easy to earn money betting on sport scores and pay the monthly rent (plus tuition of his son and daughter) but the senior Agovino still manages to transport his family to wonderful vacations in Paris, Rome, and other grand destinations. Hugo is also a "compulsive book buyer" with a bursting bookcase. He reads the New York Times and venerates Duke Ellington. But "The Bookmaker" would not be the literary jewel it is without the action/reaction of his wife, always ready to provide her husband with a reality check. The Yin and Yang couple, if you will. The title of the book could be The Bookmaker and the Cool Mother. The family of four lives in the Bronx in a concrete tower that’s part of Co-op City. Nelson Rockefeller idealized the massive complex as: "A spectacular and heartwarming answer to the problems of American cities" but Newsweek bluntly labeled it "Kibbutz in the Bronx". Mrs. Agovino "absolutely hates" this concrete jungle and dreams of escaping somewhere else. Anywhere! "Just let's get out of this dump." But that remains a fantasy because of the constrained family budget.

(By the way, as I was writing these lines, I watched the last episode of Anthony Bourdain's "Parts Unknown" that was filmed in this "never visited borough in New York City, which is a shame because the Bronx is a magical place with it's own energy, it's own food, vibe and rythm", said the chef, author and TV personality. A good show to watch as a side-dish to "The Bookmaker".)

Needless to say, the reluctant family are well aware of their genuine Italian background. But unfortunately not always a matter of pride. Co-op City was advertised in the 70's as "the working-class utopia, the utopia of utopias, with a progressive racial and ethnic makeup: 75 percent Jewish; 20 percent 'Negro' and Puerto Rican; 5 percent Irish and Italian." In other words, the Agovinos were part of the last 2.5 percent. Old ladies greeted Michael's mom with Shabbat Shalom on Friday afternoon. "When she said Thank you, but I'm not Jewish, I'm Sicilian, they still said Shabbat Shalom next time they saw her, the next week or the next month."

The chapter concerning the land of "Garibaldi, Cavour, and before them, Pirandello, Dante, Michelangelo, Raphael, the pope, and before them Augustus, Trajan, Seneca" is hilarious. With a lot of "scamorza, prosciutto, mortadella, salami, capicola, soppressata". In one instance, near Palermo, a woman "…had red hair and blue eyes. We say, ‘Scusata Signora...’ and she said, ‘come in, I was just making lunch.’ She was Sicilian so she made the marinara with eggplant, just like we did. She put out cured meats and cheeses, salamis we'd never seen before."

About the in-arrears tuition for Michael (and his sister) his dad said: "Well, don't worry about the money. It's tight, but I'll get you to college, just keep up with your studies. And just do me one favor, learn how to think. Don't let anyone teach you what to think, especially these university professors. Always question them." Fortunately, Michael managed to study at NYU.

Anybody who appreciates subtle wit and a well-woven story on a universal topic like family will enjoy "The Bookmaker". The vocabulary is evocative, extensive, and colorful. Plus some slang and street language like ginzo or dago for Italians. The reader doesn't need to live in New York to enjoy the Agovinos' adventure. Better not flip the pages too quickly! I did not.

[Alison · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great autobiographical book that intersects with a lot of my interests- co-ops, NYC politics, and Italian Americans. The author's father was raised in Italian Harlem and paints a vivid picture of the neighborhood where my grandmother was born. His family moves to co-op city in the Bronx to escape the city but soon finds that co-op city changes and declines along with NYC in the 1970s and 80s. His father is a civil servant by day and a bookie at night who is alternately being hounded to pay his debts and taking the family to Europe. There are a lot of great scenes- stickball in the shade of the building, being embarrassed to buy gabagool at the local deli, being the only white kid to rock the new kicks.

[Nette · Rating 2 out of 5]

Simply writing down every single story that your parents have told you, and every single thing that ever happened to you, DOES NOT MAKE A GOOD MEMOIR. The part about the creation of Co-Op City in the Bronx was kind of interesting, but that was one chapter. The rest of book sounds like this: "And then there was Louie, not the Louie from bakery or Big Louie from the Chinese place, but Short Louie, who was friends with Nick-Nick and Joey, who used to have that club over in the Bronx." Seriously, it goes on like that for 350 pages.

[Mitchell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Observations, based on a childhood residency, about the birth and decline of Co-op City, a failed social experiment of the 1970s imposed upon The Bronx by New York City's legendary master builder, Robert Moses. Agovino uses the hulking apartment complex as a backdrop for his memoir about growing up in a dysfunctional family, raised by free-spirited parents who aspired to high culture and advanced learning, but who got by financially through bouncing checks, and running an underground bet-placing operation.

[Mark Magee · Rating 4 out of 5]

The city setting of 1970's NYC reminded me of growing up in Philly, same kinds of urban issues of racial unrest, crime, etc. First part of the book reviewing one character's ethnic roots overwhelmed me with the amounts of names introduced, hard to follow. But the final 3/4 of the book was a good read, following the story of the author's family.

[Jeff]

Just started

[J]

Another found on the biography shelf