World's Fair
by E.L. Doctorow

This book is a wonderfully poignant creation of a certain New York City boyhood of the 1930's, seen simultaneously through the eyes of the child himself and through those of the adult who recollects that childhood. It is a time of innocence and Depression - summer dance bands in the Catskills, and comic-strip adventures in the Daily Mirror, football games at the Polo Grounds and rumors of war in the evening news. In successively smaller Bronx apartments, with their Venetial blinds, their knicknacks, their familiar furnishings packed ever closer, a mother ekes out a precarious budget from the tenuous profits of the father's Times Square music store. Near the schoolyard, the boy spots the German zeppelin Hindenburg looming sudden and majestic over the housetops, its nose tilted down, before it silently recedes, a speck over the Manhattan skyline. The family - the parents and their two sons - struggles to hold together and to move apart, braces against hardship, nurtures hopes of better times. And all of it leads irresistibly to the glittering, futuristic promis of the New York World's Fair of 1939, where the young protagonist at the age of nine crosses over into a future of his own.

Hardbound book in excellent condition.