Overview

An unforgettable true story of friendship, loyalty and revenge, set against the unmistakable backdrop of New York City. Sleepers was adapted into an award-winning film, featuring Hollywood stars Dustin Hoffman, Brad Pitt, Robert de Niro and Kevin Bacon. A moving and shocking coming-of-age story that is a must read for fans of the cult film, Stand by Me. An unforgettable true story of friendship, loyalty, violence and revenge, set against the unmistakable backdrop of New York City. Now a major film starring Dustin Hoffman, Brad Pitt, Robert de Niro and Kevin Bacon. Four boys - lifelong friends who shared everything - in the confines of New York City's Hell's Kitchen, content with playing as many pranks as they can without getting caught. Until one disastrous afternoon. When a harmless scheme goes terribly wrong, the boys are left facing a year's imprisonment in the Wilkinson Home for Boys, and the beatings and abuse they find there will change their lives forever. In the years that follow, one will become a lawyer, one a reporter, and two will grow to become hitmen for-hire. But for all of them, the legacy of Wilkinson - the pain, fear and anger - still rages on within. Only revenge will erase it. One final, audacious stand against a corrupt system. If they are caught this time, the only thing to lose is their lives.

Full Product Details

9780099628712

Table of Contents

Reviews

A compulsive true story * The Times * Undeniably powerful, an enormously affecting and intensely human story * Washington Post * A brilliant, troubling, important book * Jonathan Kellerman * Compelling * USA Today * Fabulous, unbelievably good * Entertainment Weekly *

An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally roiled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Kirkus Reviews)

Fact or fiction? As you'd expect from a former reporter on the New York Daily News, this story of a tough childhood on New York's meanest streets is written in a muscular prose style which pulls no punches. As a boy, in the 1960s, Carcaterra and his three closest friends enjoyed running wild through mob-controlled mid-Manhattan. It all seemed like exhilarating fun until one prank went too far and a man died. The four boys were sent to a reformatory school where rape and beating were routine. Two of them turned to a life of crime; another became a Prosecutor in a District Attorney's office. Carcaterra forged a living from tabloid journalism. They were reunited in court when the two criminals shot dead one of the former tormentors and the four grown men joined forces to claim justice for the violation of their childhood. (Kirkus UK)

A compulsive true story The Times Undeniably powerful, an enormously affecting and intensely human story Washington Post A brilliant, troubling, important book Jonathan Kellerman Compelling USA Today Fabulous, unbelievably good Entertainment Weekly

Author Information

Lorenzo Carcaterra was born in New York where he still lives. He was a reporter on the New York Daily News before he wrote A Safe Place. His second book, Sleepers, became a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available