Celebrated Canadian folk singer Bob Bossin tells the story of his father's life in the gambling underworld of the 1930s and 40s. By turns a touching memoir of father and son and an insightful social history, Davy the Punk is packed with street-wise stories and troubling revelations about Canada in the 20th century.
By parts history, anthropology, political science, biography and memoir, the book follows Bob's father, his family, the circles of his underworld and, later, show business associates, and a great deal more.... "The personal is political," as the feminist adage teaches us. Here, the political is personal. The events of Davy's time, roughly the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, rocked his life and career. Thanks to his son's research and insight, we can learn a lot about those politics and their legacy by reading his engaging story. It's this interweaving of political and personal that gives the book its strength and momentum. Each step on the narrative journey is supported with a wealth of background and analysis, always informative, always entertaining. Horse-racing stories and jokes are some of the best around, and the Bossins, father and son, tell them masterfully.'--Stephen Aberle "Outlook Magazine "
Deftly organized for maximum enjoyment and insight, this memoir brings to life important times in Jewish Canadian history.
Bob Bossin's memoir about his father, Davy the Punk, is an enticing, engrossing, and enchanting read. Bossin's father died when he was ten, so Bossin needed to stretch the structure of his book and create much more than a memoir. It is Jewish genealogy (Bossin's family emigrated from the Ukraine in the late 1880s), it is Canadian history (they settled in the slums of Toronto), and it is a commentary on both Canadian and American social problems (primarily gambling on horse races and bootlegging in the decades prior to World War II).
Since Bossin has direct knowledge of his father for only ten years, he has had to verify many of stories he heard as a child. In the afterword, he details the painstaking research he attempted for years; this section by itself is a superb reminder to memoir writers that the best stories get the facts straight.
Bossin's background as a journalist serves him admirably. His prose is lively, and the memoir has the intrigue of a novel. The title is a reference to his father's alleged association with gangsters. The author's style is folksy, and he often clutches a clich? and squeezes out extra metaphorical meaning: "The streets of the Ward were not paved with gold, but they were paved." Sometimes he uses a common phrase in an uncommon context, giving it new life; Bossin scorns the Volstead Act and comments that it "offered the greatest affirmative action program for criminals ever devised." His proficiency in writing is evident when his father retells one of the more famous jokes about race horses, the saga of Lucky Seven.
The vintage photographs bestow the feeling of nostalgia and are strategically placed throughout the memoir rather than incorporating them all in a separate section. This positioning serves to comment on and strengthen the narrative. Bossin characterizes Senator Estes Kefauver as less than stellar, for instance, and the accompanying photo portrays him as a dolt from Tennessee.
Readers interested in Jewish culture in Canada, the inner workings of gambling on horses, or just a bittersweet yarn of a son admiring his father will relish Bossin's story.--Thomas H. Brennan "Foreword Reviews "
