The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats
Hesh Kestin
Price: $16.95
eBook Price: $7.99
"Hesh Kestin's book, The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats, is a wonderful read on a subject which has not been explored so thoroughly in some time, Jewish gangsters wreaking havoc a half century ago is a bas relief for the hero's poignant coming of age. Russel Newhouse is a witty, feisty and perceptive young man, grappling with his own identity through the strange polyglot world he inhabits. Kestin has written an unusual novel which reads like the wind." —Lucinda Franks, Pulitzer-Prize winning author of My Father's Secret War
“[P]ulling a trigger, that’s a whole different dimension. that’s why I vote for Wystan Hugh Auden as head of the joint chiefs. Ginsberg, he’d make a great leader of the Corps. These are guys they don’t back down in the face of bad news. Although, let me tell you, Wystan is not the kind of guy who’ll let on what he thinks. Should be in the Mafia.”
“You can tell that from reading him? How do you know what he thinks other than what’s in his—” I stopped. “Wystan?”
“You want to meet him? Miserable son of a bitch, but like I say, he’d make a fine general…. A general and a poet are exactly the same in one thing. What they do they have to do with critical efficiency. Not a word or action wasted. And the action has to be more important than the man who creates it. You know Yeats?”
“You knew Yeats too?”
“Of course not. Yeats died fucking I don’t know forty years ago. I know Auden because he plays poker.”
