The year is 1946, a year after the end of World War II. The place is Brooklyn -- the poor side, the tough side: Brownsville. The time is Christmas Eve. The Christmas tree sellers have turned off their lights and gone home. The lots are empty, except for a few forlorn trees that nobody wanted. An eleven-year-old boy is sent out to pick through those trees and bring one back to the apartment where his Nanny raised him since infancy. What follows is part fable, part remembrance, part miracle. It's a story of family values -- even if "family" means a boy and his grandmother; a story of hope in hard times and great happiness growing from small things; a story of youth and age, rejuvenation and rebirth. It is a story of things that are not supposed to happen, but do. That's part of the miracle. Above all, it's a love story -- of a special kind that is the other part of the miracle.

The Tree Nobody Wanted: A Christmas Story

Tom McCann

Exeter Press Boston

Growing up in Brooklyn in the 1940s taught author Tom McCann to stand on his own two feet, take things like a man, take care of himself -and others- not to be taken care of. Only once was he in the position of being called a charity case. The story of that degradation gives this book its title. The most evil experience of a young kid's life makes tough reading. But read on. These fascinating Brooklyn stories of Tom's have been known, so far, only to those close friends who have heard him tell them. An incomparable storyteller, he would spin out these tales with deep feeling for the strange paths people's lives take: Rocco, big heart, strong body, Tom's protector who could not protect himself; Harold, the druggist who would try anything; Uncle Willie and his mother, the Duchess, who subjected him to the mystic curative powers of the linden tree; Uncle Freddie, the lovable loser who lived by his own rules, would spend or gamble until his pockets were empty, but marched home from the battlefields a war hero; Alvin, with the botched bris and the hatred for cats; and Father Hess, the monster in a Roman collar who taught Tom the uncharitable side of being a charity case. This is the way they were, the lives they led, in a special place and time - Brooklyn, NY, in the 1940s and `50s. Tom's stories take you there, make you feel all the color, camaraderie, and occasional cruelty of the strange and sometimes wonderful people who shaped the world he grew up in.

Charity Case and other stories

Literature & Fiction

Genre Fiction

Exeter Press

Amalgamation of the Late Palaeozoic Tien Shan set the stage for the evolution of the Central Asian basins. This volume presents structural, geophysical, sedimentological, stratigraphical, palaeontological and thermochronological results from research groups in Europe and Central Asia that are used to elucidate the Late Palaeozoic Cenozoic tectono-sedimentary evolution of this geologically key region.

Geological Evolution of Central Asian Basins and the Western Tien Shan Range (Geological Society of London Special Publications) (Geological Society Special Publication)

Science & Math

Marie-Françoise Brunet

Edward R. Sobel

Earth Sciences

Geological Society of London

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Books by Tom McCann