Status Updates From Now and Then: From Coney Is...

This book was a real slog for most of its length. It starts well, then becomes a frightful bore; and then, at around page 140 or 150, it finally became interesting, and I hope it stays that way. I get the impression Heller could have written a snappy essay about his past, and decided (or more likely was persuaded) to blow that essay up into a fullblown memoir.

"if a person did have to grow up in a slum...he could imagine no better one"

"I became, in a first person account–not Abraham Lincoln, which would've been ordinary–but the metal in the gun that was used to shoot him. I was born, I remember, in a mine in Chile, in a shovelful of iron ore. Papers like these were read aloud as outstanding, which was the reward I aimed for. I very strongly did want to excel and be noticed."

"Each of these benign surprises affecting me was a rapture someone born rich is not likely to ever enjoy. There are some pleasures money can't buy"

"I've learned that few pleasures are so thoroughly reinforcing to the spirit as the arrival of unexpected money"

"a thin man sitting alone at a table beckoned to me and reached out for one of my papers. As I stood there and waited in suspense, he opened it from the back, studying the racing results a few moments, and then returned it. And then he gave me a dime and wanted no newspaper. As was in heaven strolling on air as I went back outside. I was in love with a world that had such humans in it."