Five Finger Discount - Hardcover

Strapinski, Helen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0747549591 ISBN 13: 9780747549598

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2001

Synopsis

When Helene Stapinski was just five years old, her grandfather tried to kill her entire family. A dramatic memory, yet commonplace in Helene's family - in 1922 her great-grandfather murdered her great-grandmother, and even her daily bread was stolen. These stories are part of Helene's heritage.

About this title

Review:

Five Finger Discount will find instant appeal with fans of Mary Karr's groundbreaking memoir The Liars' Club. With its similarly funny, tough-minded tone, Helene Stapinski's recollections centre on her family's petty criminal history in the sordid precincts of Jersey City, USA. But Stapinski is nobody's clone; her autobiography has a tart, distinctively urban flavour that will ring a bell with anyone familiar with America's ageing, deteriorating cities. You can practically smell the soapsuds from the local Colgate factory and the stink of the bone-rendering plant in nearby Newark; people didn't settle in Jersey City, writes Stapinski, "they settled for Jersey City ... they settled for less". She was five-years-old in 1970 when her Italian-American grandfather was arrested for threatening to shoot her whole family, capping a long career that included armed robbery and beating his children. The Polish-American relatives on her father's side included a bookie and an epileptic prone to fits of rage who nearly killed a sibling by breaking his back. None of this was a big deal in Jersey City, notes Stapinski, who deftly interweaves her family's story with the rancid saga of Hudson County's corrupt political machine. She fled to college in Manhattan and a career in journalism without ever really escaping the ties of blood and loyalty; her frank rendering of her mixed feelings as Jersey City was slowly upscaled reminds us what is gained and lost through gentrification. Stapinski's salty, savoury account conveys the gritty, enduring legacy of Jersey City: "so tough, I was always prepared for what might come my way". --Wendy Smith

Review:

" [Five-Finger Discount] will steal your heart." -- People " By turns hilarious and alarming, uproarious and depressing, [stapinski' s] book reads on the surface like something by Damon Runyon and Elmore Leonard, with a dark undertow of real-life pain and disillusion." -- Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times " It's a brilliant book, a darling book. It is the blessedly modest chronicle of a magical consciousness that seems to have been born pulling diamonds out of the muck, hearing angels' voices in the fiercest thunder....I adored every word of this wondrous book. Get it. Read it." -- Michael Pakenham, Baltimore Sun " In the tradition of...Rita Mae Brown and Amy Tan, Ms. Stapinski is an exciting writer, unabashedly candid, and at the same time unashamedly self-contained. Five-Finger Discount is a must-read." -- Victoria Gotti, The New York Observer " What [Frank] McCourt did for Limerick, Ireland, Helene Stapinski does for Jersey City." -- Newark Sunday Star-Ledger " Hugely entertaining." -- London Sunday Times

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0747549591
• ISBN 13: 9780747549598
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 266