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Book details
  • Genre:FICTION
  • SubGenre:Family Life / General
  • Language:English
  • Pages:100
  • eBook ISBN:9781890911393

Not Just Another Christmas Story

by Michael Cinquanti Sr.

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Overview
Not Just Another Christmas Story is the type of inspirational, laugh-out-loud story that people of all ages won’t be able to stop reading, especially Italian-American baby-boomers raised in urban neighborhoods that were dominated by family, the Catholic Church and the mob. It describes the hilarious 1956 Holiday season of Brooklyn’s Gerardi family.
Description
Forced to leave a life he loved as a schoolboy soccer sensation in pre WWII Italy, Gino Gerardi rebelled when he got to America. He dropped out of high school, drifted from one low-paying job to another and gambling quickly replaced soccer as the passion of his life. Then he fell in love. Gino adores his wife and three young sons but he still cannot resist the lure of a card game. Just one week before Christmas in 1956, Gino has once again lost his entire paycheck playing poker. In an effort to salvage the Holiday for his boys and save his crumbling marriage, he borrows money from the most notorious loan shark in Brooklyn. What he's being forced to do to repay the mobster sets up the Yankee Stadium setting for a Christmas Day surprise ending to this compelling tale. Not Just Another Christmas is presented in the narrative style as a connected series of the childhood memories of Gino’s youngest son. Now fifty-eight years old. Jimmy Gerardi’s poignant recollections of those seven crazy days are often hilarious and sometimes quite irreverent. These detailed flashbacks vividly recapture the powerful impact of family, the Catholic Church, and organized crime on the daily lives of the millions of people who lived in big-city Italian-American neighborhoods during the 1950s.
About the author
Cinquanti is founder and President of Genium Group Inc, a 1984 technical publishing spin off of the General Electric Company. Mike is also the author of the popular Pinstripe Birthdays Blog, hosted at Major League Baseball's Web site, MLBlogs.com. He's a lifelong sports fan and is passionate about Yankee baseball, Giants football and Celtics basketball. Cinquanti cherishes the memories he has of growing up in a large and slightly crazy extended Italian American family, especially those involving childhood Christmas Holidays. He and his wife Rosemary have four children and four grandchildren and reside in upstate New york.