Making a Life in Yorkville: Experience and Meaning in the Life-course Narrative of an Urban Working-class Man (The Life Course and Aging)

Handel's outstanding book provides an insightful and intimate view into the life of a working-class man in a big city neighborhood. He traces the life-course experience of Tony Santangelo (a pseudonym), an Italian, Catholic, construction worker who grew up in Yorkville, a neighborhood in New York's upper east side. The reviews of the initial printing were uniformly excellent. Handel's analysis of the life course of "Tony Santangelo" is an exceptional book, drawing extensively on both theory and methods in a way other life course researchers should emulate. His purpose is to broaden the study of the life course by applying the methods of life history to analyze lives and using the symbolic interactionist perspective. The life history is a longstanding approach to data collection, but its use by life course researchers has not been extensive. Similarly, the foundations that underlie Handel's theorizing are as old as the symbolic interactionist perspective itself; yet life course researchers underutilize this approach today. Handel builds on these "classical" approaches to develop new concepts in making sense of his life course data, and this original theorizing provides useful tools for others to use. Gerald Handel is professor of sociology at the City College and The Graduate Center of the City University of New York.