Description
Book SynopsisThe old neighborhood was the place that Joe Mackall left. It was a place where everyone's parents worked at the factory at the dead end of the street, where the Catholic church operated like a religious city hall, and where he grew up vowing to get out as soon as he could and to shed his blue-collar beginnings and failed, flawed religion.
Trade Review"A candid portrayal that oftentimes paints Mackall in a bad light, but he refused to back down from the truth."—
Collegian"Powerfully imagined and poetically told."—George Fetherling,
New Brunswick Reader"
The Last Street Before Cleveland is a deeply personal book and one that packs a lot of emotion and power in a slim volume. . . . Well worth reading."—Kevin Holtsberry,
Collected Miscellany"Joe Mackall's
The Last Street Before Cleveland is a welcome addition to the necessary literature of America's working class. He gives voice to men we wrongly think of as silent and he respects the enormity of the loss. He shows us, in tender, muscular prose, how glorious and arduous roots can be. In his own journey back to understanding, he complicates the meaning of leaving and finding our deepest homes."—Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, author of
Random Family"Beautifully written—honest, naked, graceful."—Brian Doyle, author of
Leaping: Revelations and Epiphanies"Joe Mackall has written a stunning blue-collar memoir of recovery that goes far beyond the conventional dependency narrative. There is more at issue in
The Last Street Before Cleveland than the struggle for sobriety, sanity, and well-being, since his quest isn’t so much a matter of recovery 'from' as it is recovery 'of.' What Mackall recovers is (to borrow Rudolf Otto’s classic title) 'the idea of the holy,' or, as others might put it, 'the overabounding.' The extraordinary account of how this happens adds a new and exciting episode to the variety of American religious experience."—Robert Atwan, editor of the
Best American Essays series
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