Rate this book

Closing Time (2009)

by Joe Queenan(Favorite Author)

3.43 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

067002063X (ISBN13: 9780670020638)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

Viking Adult

review 1: Much of what you want to know about Joe Queenan's memoir of growing up poor, white and Irish in 1960's Philadelphia is presaged in the title's double-entendre. The twin themes of alcoholism and end-of-life reconciliation with the savage impact his father's drinking and physical abuse had on his childhood family occupy much of the book's energy. This strangely, wryly funny reflection on how a father's weakness and poor choices forced a son to turn outward and invent his own life and escape vector from the despair, poverty and drunken beatings that defined his youth grabs you from the very beginning. Queenan's Catholicism is woven throughout as he grapples with sin, redemption, and forgiveness. The framing device of Father-Son is more subtle than you might think, and provoke... mores meditations in the reader on the power of Free Will and self-invention to overcome environmental adversity. The prose is delicious - I found myself wanting to copy down phrases just to internalize their simple clarity.
review 2: Closing Time is a depiction of the author’s childhood and of his violent, alcoholic father, and an account of the life that he created in reaction to his upbringing. Queenan is at once penetratingly analytic, passionate, opinionated, humorous. He gave me much food for thought – about the soul-sucking hardships of poverty, and about choice and how we come to terms with our lives, each in our own fashion. less

Download links for: Closing Time

Advertising