Once an engineer : a song of the Salt City / Joe Amato.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Amato, Joe, 1955-

Series:

SUNY series in Italian/American culture.

SUNY series in Italian/American culture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Italian Americans--New York (State)--New York Region--Social life and customs--Anecdotes.

Italian Americans.

Syracuse (N.Y.)--Social life and customs--20th century--Anecdotes.

Syracuse (N.Y.).

Amato, Joe, 1955---Childhood and youth--Anecdotes.

Amato, Joe.

Amato family--Anecdotes.

Amato family.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (272 p.)

Place of Publication:

Albany : State University of New York Press, c2009.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Finalist for the 2009 ForeWord Book of the Year in the Autobiography/Memoir CategoryOnce an Engineer is a funny, tragic, garlicky chronicle of a dozen years spent growing up on the wrong side of the tracks. The tail end of the sixties finds Joe and his younger brother, Mike, living with their divorced and unemployed father in a low-income neighborhood on the edge of Syracuse, New York, a once prosperous city now down on its luck. Mike and Joe mature under their father's distinctively masculine tutelage, but their dreams of a better life are tempered by the harsh realities of public assistance.When the brothers are offered the chance to attend college, they are drawn to the engineering profession, with its seductive promise of middle-class wages and social status. At the same time, their father's trade, furniture finishing, succumbs to a new era of industrial and economic change, and as the gap between father and sons widens, they come to learn the true costs of upward mobility.Once an Engineer tells the story of three lives rooted in the moods and lore of Central New York, and the difficulty of finding meaningful work in a world gone inexorably, technologically global.

Contents:

Front Matter

Contents

Bildung

Winter Rat

Landscaping

Wicked Piss

Games People Play

The Flying Pork Chops

Linkage

Rebuilding

Salt City

Just Produce

Primitive Roots

Say-Cursed Susan B. Anthonies

Notes toward a Supreme Fiction

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN:

1-4384-2853-7

1-4416-2412-0

OCLC:

505977262