Publisher Description
"The numerous voices presenting these oral histories are flowing, velvety, glib, humorous, and always passionate...This is an informative and heartwarming retrospective of life in the Bronx, in addition to an enlightening look at the changes in our society and culture." — Publishers Weekly, starred review
A touching and provocative collection of autobiographical anecdotes that evoke the history of one of America's most influential boroughs--the Bronx--through some of its many success stories
The vivid oral histories in Arlene Alda's Just Kids from the Bronx reveal what it was like to grow up in the place that bred the influencers in just about every field of endeavor today. The Bronx is where Michael Kay, the New York Yankees' play-by-play broadcaster, first experienced baseball, where J. Crew's Millard (Mickey) Drexler got his street smarts and his first jobs, where Neil deGrasse Tyson and Dava Sobel were urged to pursue science and where music-making inspired hip hop's Grandmaster Melle Mel to change the world of music forever.
The parks, the pick-up games, the tough and tender mothers, the politics, the gangs, the food--for people who grew up in the Bronx, childhood recollections are fresh. Arlene Alda's own Bronx memories were a jumping-off point from which to reminisce with a nun, a police officer, an urban planner, and with Al Pacino, Mary Higgins Clark, Carl Reiner, Colin Powell, Maira Kalman, Bobby Bonilla, and many other leading artists, athletes, scientists and entrepreneurs--experiences spanning six decades of Bronx living. Alda then arranged these pieces of the past, the mornings on the Grand Concourse and afternoons in the halls of Bronx Science, into one great collective story, a film-like portrait of the Bronx from the early twentieth century until today.
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About the Narrators
Alan Alda is an American actor, director, screenwriter, and author. A six-time Emmy Award and Golden Globe Award winner, he played Hawkeye Pierce for eleven years in the television series M*A*S*H and has acted in, written, and directed many feature films. He has starred often on Broadway, and his avid interest in science has led to his hosting PBS’s Scientific American Frontiers for eleven years. He was nominated for an Academy Award in 2005 and has been nominated for thirty Emmy awards.
Regis Philbin has been entertaining television audiences for more than fifty years, in daytime reigning as a beloved morning-show host, in nighttime as an über game-show host, and also as a fixture on national and local late-night shows. He is most widely known for Live! With Regis and Kathie Lee and its subsequent incarnation Live! With Regis and Kelly; Who Wants to Be a Millionaire; Million Dollar Password; and the first season of America’s Got Talent. Philbin is the proud recipient of five Emmy Awards, including a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, a Broadcasting & Cable Lifetime Achievement Award, the Walter Camp Distinguished American Award at Yale University, and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In 2006 he was inducted into both the National Association of Broadcasters Hall of Fame and the Television Academy’s Hall of Fame. He lives in New York and Connecticut with his wife, Joy.
Christina Delaine is an AudioFile Earphones Award–winning narrator and accomplished stage actress. Her theater credits include Jewtopia, the longest-running comedy in Off-Broadway history, and the title role in Antigone at both Portland Center Stage and Kentucky Repertory Theatre. She holds a BA degree from Dartmouth College and an MFA in acting from Brown University.
Kiff VandenHeuvel, voice talent and audiobook narrator, is originally from Grand Rapids, Michigan, and is an alumni of the Second City comedy theater. He is an accomplished improviser and sketch comedy director, and he teaches voice-over, improv, and directing at Second City Hollywood. He has appeared in hundreds of television and radio commercials and is well known in the video game community as the voice of Zachary Hale Comstock in Bioshock: Infinite.