Esther Has a Living Will and Other Fairy Tales for Adult Children
… uses a series of situational vignettes to illustrate the challenges of caring for an aging parent. Each vignette effectively balances the emotional and pragmatic difficulties of making sound decisions and resolving conflicts that frequently arise around elder care. An excellent resource for families with aging relatives as well as health professionals who work with those families.
—Linda Lindsey Davis, PhD, RN, ANP, FAAN
Ann Henshaw Gardiner Distinguished Professor of Nursing and
Senior Fellow in the Center for the Study of Aging and Human Development
Duke University
A delightful book. The chapter regarding Patient Safety is clearly written and an excellent resource for patients and their families.
—Mary Salisbury, RN, MSN
President, The Cedar Institute
Investigator, “TeamSTEPPS™: Strategies &Tools to Enhance Performance and Patient Safety”
U.S. Department of Defense and
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality
Neighborhood Boys Who Ran
Jack Rosenblatt’s Neighborhood Boys Who Ran is a classic New York crime story. The book hurtles along from the West Side of Manhattan to Little Italy and points beyond with the noirish Jack Dooney running into and through all kinds of obstacles, characters and land mines to get to the bottom of a vexing mystery. Anyone who likes New York City and crime stories will love Neighborhood Boys.
—Andy Rosenzweig, Retired Chief Investigator, Manhattan D.A.’s Office;
and Detective/Lieutenant, N.Y.P.D.
The dialogue is Mike Hammer’s if he had favored Hunan pork as much as whiskey.
—Alan Feuer
The New York Times
Hard-boiled noir, with a shot of scotch and a beer chaser. Think Dashiell Hammett. Raymond Chandler. James Cain. Elmore Leonard. Jack Rosenblatt has written a classic detective novel. The prose is tight, taut, and frequently hits the bulls-eye. The plot is complicated and convoluted, but the pieces of the puzzle all ultimately fit. The characters are classic New Yorkers, especially Jack Dooney, a kid from the old neighborhood who played briefly for the NFL and then hung out his P.I. shingle. I challenge you to open the book randomly to virtually any page. You’ll find prose to rival the masters.
Page 8: She was in her late thirties, a dark-eyed, raven-haired French-Canadian beauty who always wore her skirts a little too short and her fingernails a little too long and I loved her for it.
Page 45: There are different kinds of shock and I didn’t have the earthquake or high explosives kind, which is as much physical as mental and nervous, but I had the mental certainty has been shattered kind, the JFK has been shot, the losing with four aces, the Philadelphia 76ers with Kareem Abdul Jabbar kind.
Page 90: There was heat in Vinny D’s eyes and a giant no-neck guy, probably six foot six, 300 pounds, standing against the wall behind him. No-neck was wearing a big blue Hawaiian shirt and had a conspicuous bulge over his left hip.
Page 108: Someone knocking on my door on Warren Street at 9:30 p.m. was about as likely as Elvis Presley running in the next New York City marathon.
Page 188: I met Margaret Elway in the back of a yuppie café in Soho called Carpichio’s, where they’d taken a floor of an old warehouse, spray-painted its walls black, put in air-conditioning, track lighting, an assortment of old hotel sofas bought at auction, then plastered the walls with posters of famous paintings mixed in with some real paintings, deservedly not famous. The sofa was pale rust, very large and soft, and I sank into it. Margaret Elway was on the other end of it, six feet away, showing a lot of leg and just enough thigh, maybe too much thigh.
And these are just a random few.
The novel is a homage to New York, the city the author loved. At the core of it all is a group of boyhood friends who were together back in the 1970s at Regis High School. Jack Dooney, private investigator. Billy McGonigle. Sal Fuccio. Mix in the mob, a few bail bondsmen, a Senator who may or may not be on the take, multiple Chinese take-outs, Irish watering holes, midnight meetings, and lots of good looking dames, and you’ve got a fast-paced, funny, ultimately moving story about the strange twists and turns life can take and how resilient human beings sometimes are.
—Cindy Dale
Cindy Dale is a two-time nominee for a Pushcart Prize. Her short stories have been published in a variety of literary journals including Orchid, The South Carolina Review, Reed, The Amherst Review, Literary Popourri, The Potomac Review, and Zoetrope: All-Story Extra.
