Just Kids Stories A Collection: Or Are They?

Patti Smith Remembers Life With Mapplethorpe

---

Would you like to tell us about a lower price? If you are a seller for this product, would you like to suggest updates through seller support? Read more Read less. Customers who bought this item also bought. Page 1 of 1 Start over Page 1 of 1. My Old Neighborhood Remembered: A Bronx Boy's Tale. The Bronx Lost, Found, and Remembered Never Have Your Dog Stuffed: And Other Things I've Learned. Customers who viewed this item also viewed. The Beautiful Bronx Then and Now Book. Henry Holt and Co.

March 3, Language: Start reading Just Kids from the Bronx on your Kindle in under a minute. Don't have a Kindle? Try the Kindle edition and experience these great reading features: Share your thoughts with other customers. Write a customer review.

Customers who bought this item also bought

Showing of reviews. Top Reviews Most recent Top Reviews. There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later. Audio CD Verified Purchase.

I have just finished listening to the audio cd version of this book and after reading some of the other reviews, it is reasonable to say that there is some truth to all of the reviews. I was hoping for a nostalgic look back at my home borough through the eyes and ears of other people raised in the Bronx. While there are some descriptive narratives of life in the Bronx, the balance weighs in favor of autobiographical statements, some of which are a bit narcissistic in tone. You might think in response to many of the stories At the same time, if you were looking forward to reading vignettes about the lives and times of famous people who grew up in the Bronx with the emphasis on "famous", this collection will be satisfying.

I didn't find the writing very capturing or compelling as suggest by the professional reviews. Over the course of six compact discs there were enough good memories triggered to make the purchase worthwhile though I would suggest tempering your expectations. Kindle Edition Verified Purchase. It brings you back home to a simpler and more friendly time when it was ok to be a teenager A feel good book for anyone with childhood friends and a special feeling for those from the Bronx.

Reading this fantastic book felt like visting each of the people featured and having a very intimate conversation which is essentially what the book provides - dozens of intimate, very personal, "visits" with people who are extraordinary in many varied ways in spite of or, more likely, BECAUSE they are Just Kids From The Bronx. The underlying themes and feelings are at once universal AND uniquely "Bronx.

It has an added bonus of being written in short chapters which makes it perfect for reading in the Kindle app on your phone or tablet while waiting on lines or in offices! I love this book. This book shows how kids born into adverse or not so good circumstances can still grow up to be successful people in the world.

It is very motivational and inspiring. I have truly enjoyed reading this book and want to read it again. This book shows that you can grow up and be whatever you want if you focus. The author did such a good job of putting these stories together. I've told all my friends about it. I may be partial given that I grew up in the Bronx and the author was my piano teacher.

She likely does not remember me. Whether I am partial or not, this is fine book about the influence of childhood neighborhoods, how they affect our lives. There is an interesting range of decades and a representation of several ethnic groups with stories that deserve to be told.

Each location an entity of its own. I enjoyed the stories of each of these wonderful "kids", and memory lane strolls were warm and wonderful. This kid from th and Bainbridge enjoyed my stroll. I enjoyed reading about persons who spent childhood in the Bronx of years ago. But then I had a connection to the Bronx since my grandparents lived there in the 's and 40's. It brought back memories of my own childhood visiting there.

Each neighborhood of the Bronx is unique and these stories give is a look into life there.

For the next few years we lived in temporary housing set up for servicemen and their children — whitewashed barracks overlooking an abandoned field alive with wildflowers. We called the field The Patch, and in summertime the grown-ups would sit and talk, smoke cigarettes, and pass around jars of dandelion wine while we children played. My mother taught us the games of her childhood: Statues, Red Rover, and Simon Says.

We made daisy chains to adorn our necks and crown our heads.

In the evenings we collected fireflies in mason jars, extracting their lights and making rings for our fingers. My mother taught me to pray; she taught me the prayer her mother taught her. Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. At nightfall, I knelt before my little bed as she stood, with her ever-present cigarette, listening as I recited after her. I wished nothing more than to say my prayers, yet these words troubled me and I plagued her with questions. What is the soul? What color is it?

I suspected my soul, being mischievous, might slip away while I was dreaming and fail to return. I did my best not to fall asleep, to keep it inside of me where it belonged. Perhaps to satisfy my curiosity, my mother enrolled me in Sunday school. We were taught by rote, Bible verses and the words of Jesus. Afterward we stood in line and were rewarded with a spoonful of comb honey. There was only one spoon in the jar to serve many coughing children. I instinctively shied from the spoon but I swiftly accepted the notion of God. It pleased me to imagine a presence above us, in continual motion, like liquid stars.

Not contented with my child's prayer, I soon petitioned my mother to let me make my own.

Just Kids from the Bronx: Telling It the Way It Was: An Oral History

I was relieved when I no longer had to repeat the words If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take and could say instead what was in my heart. Thus freed, I would lie in my bed by the coal stove vigorously mouthing long letters to God. I was not much of a sleeper and I must have vexed him with my endless vows, visions, and schemes.

But as time passed I came to experience a different kind of prayer, a silent one, requiring more listening than speaking. My small torrent of words dissipated into an elaborate sense of expanding and receding. It was my entrance into the radiance of imagination. This process was especially magnified within the fevers of influenza, measles, chicken pox, and mumps. I had them all and with each I was privileged with a new level of awareness. Lying deep within myself, the symmetry of a snowflake spinning above me, intensifying through my lids, I seized a most worthy souvenir, a shard of heaven's kaleidoscope.

My love of prayer was gradually rivaled by my love for the book.

See a Problem?

I would sit at my mother's feet watching her drink coffee and smoke cigarettes with a book on her lap. Her absorption intrigued me. Though not yet in nursery school, I liked to look at her books, feel their paper, and lift the tissues from the frontispieces. I wanted to know what was in them, what captured her attention so deeply. When my mother discovered that I had hidden her crimson copy of Foxe 's Book of Martyrs beneath my pillow, with hopes of absorbing its meaning, she sat me down and began the laborious process of teaching me to read.

With great effort we moved through Mother Goose to Dr. I was completely smitten by the book. I longed to read them all, and the things I read of produced new yearnings.

Perhaps I might go off to Africa and offer my services to Albert Schweitzer or, decked in my coonskin cap and powder horn, I might defend the people like Davy Crockett. I could scale the Himalayas and live in a cave spinning a prayer wheel, keeping the earth turning. But the urge to express myself was my strongest desire, and my siblings were my first eager coconspirators in the harvesting of my imagination.

They listened attentively to my stories, willingly performed in my plays, and fought valiantly in my wars. With them in my corner, anything seemed possible. In the months of spring, I was often ill and so condemned to my bed, obliged to hear my comrades at play through the open window. In the months of summer, the younger ones reported bedside how much of our wild field had been secured in the face of the enemy. We lost many a battle in my absence and my weary troops would gather around my bed and I would offer a benediction from the child soldier's bible, A Child's Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson.

In the winter, we built snow forts and I led our campaign, serving as general, making maps and drawing out strategies as we attacked and retreated. We fought the wars of our Irish grandfathers, the orange and the green. We wore the orange yet knew nothing of its meaning. They were simply our colors. When attention flagged, I would draw a truce and visit my friend Stephanie. She was convalescing from an illness I didn't really understand, a form of leukemia. She was older than I, perhaps twelve to my eight. I didn't have much to say to her and was perhaps little comfort, yet she seemed to delight in my presence.

I believe that what really drew me to her was not my good heart, but a fascination with her belongings. Her older sister would hang up my wet garments and bring us cocoa and graham crackers on a tray. Stephanie would lie back on a mound of pillows and I would tell tall tales and read her comics. I marveled at her comic-book collection, stacks of them earned from a childhood spent in bed, every issue of Superman, Little Lulu, Classic Comics, and House of Mystery. In her old cigar box were all the talismanic charms of I could play with them endlessly and sometimes, if she had doubles, she would give one to me.

I had a secret compartment near my bed, beneath the floorboards. There I kept my stash — winnings from marbles, trading cards, religious artifacts I rescued from Catholic trash bins: I put my loot from Stephanie there. Something told me I shouldn't take presents from a sick girl, but I did and hid them away, somewhat ashamed. I had promised to visit her on Valentine 's Day, but I didn't. My duties as general to my troop of siblings and neighboring boys were very taxing and there was heavy snow to negotiate.

It was a harsh winter that year. The following afternoon, I abandoned my post to sit with her and have cocoa. She was very quiet and begged me to stay even as she drifted off to sleep. I rummaged through her jewel box. It was pink and when you opened it a ballerina turned like a sugarplum fairy. I was so taken with a particular skating pin that I slipped it in my mitten. I sat frozen next to her for a long time, leaving silently as she slept. I buried the pin amongst my stash. I slept fitfully through the night, feeling great remorse for what I had done. In the morning I was too ill to go to school and stayed in bed, ridden with guilt.

Navigation menu

I vowed to return the pin and ask her to forgive me. The following day was my sister Linda's birthday, but there was to be no party for her. Stephanie had taken a turn for the worse and my father and mother went to a hospital to give blood.

• BLESSINGS, TEARS and a CHUCKLE or TWO: (BALLADS of a WAND’RING MINSTREL)
• 1916 Proclamation: Ireland and the Easter Rising of 1916
• 13 Gay Colonies
• La Pedagogía Social en la Universidad. Investigación, formación y compromiso social (Spanish Edition)
• My Sky Is For Upliftment
• La fièvre du désir (Harlequin Azur) (French Edition)