Over the past two decades, Joe Queenan has established himself as a scourge of everything that is half-baked, half-witted, and halfhearted in American Culture. In Closing Time, Queenan turns his sights on a more serious and a more personal topic: his childhood in a Philadelphia housing project in the early 1960s. By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, Closing Time recounts Queenan's Irish Catholic upbringing in a family dominanted by his erratic, alcoholic father, and his long flight away from the dismal confines of his neighborhood into the great, wide world. A story of salvation and escape, this unforgettable account of the damge done to children by parents without prospects, and of the grace and determination those children find to rise above their circumstances.

ISBN: 9780143116684