Trust Your Mother but Cut the Cards.By Sidney Zion Sidney Zion is an American writer. His works include Markers, Begin from Beginning, Read All about It, Trust Your Mother but Cut the Cards, (collections of his columns), Loyalty and Betrayal: The Story of the American Mob and (Barricade, 312 pp., $15.95) THE BEST pieces in this collection, mostly of newspaper columns but including two items from NR, vividly evoke the old New York New York, state, United States New York, Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of saloon life, when Broadway produced tunes you could whistle, a guy could call a woman columnist a "right broad" without getting slapped, and people took the reigning pieties with a grain of salt and a shot of bourbon Bourbon (b  rbôN`), European royal family, originally of France; a cadet branch of the Capetian dynasty. . In
Sidney Zion's New York, writers, composers, businessmen, and
reporters are regular guys who understand that above all else, a man
wants his dinner and his woman. They spend their nights, and often their
days, in bars with their friends and mistresses. Zion reminds us that,
not too long ago, normal people with normal (if sometimes raffish raff·ish adj. 1. Cheaply or showily vulgar in appearance or nature; tawdry. 2. Characterized by a carefree or fun-loving unconventionality; rakish. ) lifestyles lived in Gotham. One word of caution: The essays on political subjects tend to drift into a simplistic sim·plism n. The tendency to oversimplify an issue or a problem by ignoring complexities or complications. [French simplisme, from simple, simple, from Old French; see simple liberalism of the kind that gives college newspapers a bad name. No matter. Buy the book, and skip the parts Tony Lewis could have written. |
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