Wednesday, 19 April 2017

Undertow - Helen Parkhurst

The Story of a Boy called Tony


G. BELL & SONS
1ST PRINTING 1964
LONDON, UK

Undertow is the biography of Tony who, in his twenty-seven years of life, experienced crime, punishment and redemption. Bred in New York's Harlem, the son of Italian parents, he took part in his first hold-up at the age of thirteen and graduated to a five-year sentence for peddling heroin at the age of seventeen. On his release from prison he married and attempted to earn an honest living but, through his wife's folly, was obliged to leave the sanctuary he had found in Connecticut and return to New York. There he was shot by his former associates and his body thrown on the municipal garbage dump.

Tony's story is true. Indeed, large sections of it are vividly told in his own words recorded by Miss Helen Parkhurst, the distinguished educationalist who became Tony's counsellor during his long struggle to break with his past. Her book has all the inevitability, and something of the poetry, of a Greek tragedy-a man's progress towards personal integrity which is achieved only at the cost of his life.

In his foreword Mr C. A. Joyce writes: 'This is a book that should be in every Teachers' Training College Library and it should be read by all who are concerned with the adolescent in Clubs and elsewhere...If you do pick it up you will find it difficult to put down.' Tony's history will be of close interest to the general reader as well as to teachers, to all who work with young people, and to sociologists.

Tuesday, 18 April 2017

The Wanton Boys - Mark Oliver

A shattering novel about Italian street gangs, their hates, lusts and perverse and brutal ways in a world that scorns and damns them


PYRAMID BOOKS G567
1ST PRINTING DECEMBER 1960
NEW YORK, USA
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN HARDBACK BY DOUBLEDAY & CO 
COVER ART BY TONY KOKINOS

The Wanton Boys is a brutally realistic story of Pasquale Rossano, a young boy, who ran away from the fishing village he grew up in. He joined other street urchins in Naples where they sought love, a little food and warmth and where they tried to find a place in the sun of life.

These urchins were scorned, fore-doomed and damned by the world to a living hell of a bat-filled, rat-infested, diseased-filled existence. They learned cruel lessons that only the young must learn when adult life is thrust upon them. They learned the bestiality of animal lust and forbidden passion from prostitutes and homosexuals; they found that they were less than human and that the poor, the starving and the weak have no place in life.

This is every wayward youth's story-an unflinching, true-to-life, memorable novel that you will not soon forget.

Monday, 17 April 2017

B-Girl - Robert Novak

NO LIFE FOR A VIRGIN


ACE BOOKS S-174
1ST PRINTING 1956
NEW YORK, USA

PIED PIPER OF HOT JAZZ

From Basin Street to Broadway, Chuck was it-the boy with the golden lip! When he picked up his trumpet for a solo, the crowds went wild. And wherever he played, there was always a girl who knew what Chuck wanted-and was willing to play a one-night stand. Until Irene sang her way into the little band-and Chuck's life.

Maybe her voice wasn't really good, but the customers liked it. And then, abruptly, the song changed, the notes went sour. Irene found herself caught up in a whirling crescendo of discord, and, somehow, somewhere Chuck was in the center of it all-composing the score for the mad music.

Sunday, 16 April 2017

This Passing Night - Clive Miller



SECKER & WARBURG 
1ST PRINTING 1963
LONDON, UK
COVER ART BY LAZLO ACS

Here is an American novel about youth, new and big and different in the way that West Side Story was big and new and different. Clive Miller's first novel, adult in approach, searing in authenticity, in style recalls Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway. In content it penetrates to the quick, exposes rawly as an open wound the lives and attitudes of American youth today: the privileged young people of private schools, Harvard and New York, and the youth of Brooklyn gangs.

Richard Pierson and Amadeo Magini grew up together in Brooklyn and then their lives separated. The world of Pierson was not without conflict and doubt, frustration and desire, but it was firmly rooted in the confident axis of college, Harvard, New York and its suburbs, and there was always Europe to escape to if the design of life proved unforeseen and unwelcome. Magini's world was equally firm rooted, but against a setting of violence and brutality in which power was the ultimate value and survival a constant struggle.

As Richard Pierson and his friends seek love and purpose in their lives, Amadeo Magini seeks a truce between the Cheetahs and the Noble Magicians. On the Cote d'Azur a young American and an Italian girl have a lyrically romantic affair, and in a Brooklyn cinema against the pounding background of rock-and-roll there is a brutal rape. The lives and worlds of Pierson and Magini cross once again before the powerful and violent climax: the rumble between the Cheetahs and the Noble Magicians.

This Passing Night contains scenes of devastating violence juxtaposed with scenes of great tenderness, quiet and private alongside the brutality of rumble and rape. By turns romantic and violent, it is always truthful and convincing. The effect is like a cold shower on a hot day: of great immediacy and utterly refreshing. Clive Miller has made an impressive start to his literary career.

Saturday, 15 April 2017

A Rage To Kill - B. E. Lovell

Young Hoodlums...out to Maim and Murder!


DIGIT BOOKS D253
1ST PRINTING - NO DATE
LONDON, UK

Private investigator Edge Hannegan had sent his partner, on a routine mission. But Danny never reported back. His bloody, beaten body lay in an alley, surrounded by garbage...and all the evidence said it was the work of some thrill-crazed young punks...

This is the gripping story of a manhunt on Terror's dark pavements.

Friday, 14 April 2017

Cry, Brother, Cry - Jack Karney

A Novel Of Delinquents And Mobsters In The Making


POPULAR LIBRARY EAGLE BOOKS EDITION G304
1ST PRINTING JANUARY 1959
NEW YORK, USA

VIOLENCE IN THE STREETS

Brawling in the streets...making love in dark hallways...snitching the luxuries they crave...the tough juveniles of New York's Lower East Side know only one way to get back at the sordid world that spawned them-by organized violence.

This is the wallop-packing story of one teen-age gang leader who made the easy shift from switch-blades to guns, from street rumbles to organized violence and vice...Until the jobs he pulled off for the city's top crime organization became too dirty for even corrupt cops to take.

Thursday, 13 April 2017

Black Is Beautiful - B. B. Johnson

He's a bad, bold soul brother up to his sweet hips in revolution - and women!


PAPERBACK LIBRARY 64-305
1ST PRINTING APRIL 1970
NEW YORK, USA

Black May Be Beautiful, Baby, But It's Also The Color Of Death...

Richard Abraham Spade-Superspade-was beginning to have his doubts about the militants.
He had seen for himself how the Black Jaguars handled renegade brothers. It was the most brutal ritual he had ever witnessed. 
He had seen how the Jaguars had sprung their brilliant leader, Ridge Hatchett, author of Hell on Fire, from Death Row. And he knew about their master plan for revolution.