Great product!Product DescriptionNow a PBS documentary this?astonishing memoir of growing up in rough-and-tumble Jersey City will steal your heart (People)
With deadpan humor and obvious affection Five-Finger Discount recounts the story of an unforgettable New Jersey family of swindlers bookies embezzlers and mobster-wannabes. In the memoir Mary Karr calls a page-turner Helene Stapinski ingeniously weaves the checkered history of her hometown of Jersey Citya place known for its political corruption and industrial blightwith the tales that have swirled around her relatives for decades. Navigating a childhood of toxic waste and tough love Stapinski tells an extraordinary tale at once heartbreaking and hysterically funny.
Praise for?Five-Finger Discount
By turns hilarious and alarming [Helene Stapinskis] 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?? The 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"nger Discount is a must-read.???Victoria Gotti?? The New York Observer
??What [Frank] McCourt did for Limerick?? Ireland?? Helene Stapinski does for Jersey City.???The Star-Ledger
??Hugely entertaining.???The Sunday Times (London)Amazon.com ReviewFans of Mary Karr's groundbreaking memoir The Liars' Club will relish the similarly funny?? tough-minded tone of Helene Stapinski's recollections centering on her family's petty criminal history in the sordid precincts of Jersey City. But Stapinski is nobody's clone; her autobiography has a tart?? distinctively urban Northeast flavor that will ring a bell with anyone familiar with America's aging?? deteriorating cities. You can practically smell the soap suds 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?? "for Jersey City ... they settled for less." She was 5 years old in 1970 when her Italian American grandfather was arrested f