Brooklyn is a mythic place and the Gowanus Canal, pestilent and fertile, is its Nile. “Yous stay outta that #!##! water,” Uncle Honey used to warn us.

We never listened.

Long before Whole Foods took over an abandoned site beside the Gowanus, and shiny condos sprouted

on the shores of the still-toxic canal, a proud and unruly Italian American enclave staked out this small

corner of Brooklyn and declared it home. It was a brutal but fiercely loving world, dominated by the Church and the Mafia, codes of silence, and most of all, one-of-a-kind characters.

In Gowanus Crossing, Vincent Coppola brings the world of his childhood ferociously to life. There’s a

four-foot-tall wise guy who walks a lion on a leash; a predatory priest who has a secret path to the local school; Coppola’s three wayward brothers and their embittered longshoreman father; and a host of other schemers, scammers, mobsters, bookies, gamblers, and certifiable crazies.

Coppola’s journey through and eventually out of Gowanus is harrowing, often hilarious, and ultimately heartbreaking. He tells his story with the gimlet eye Frank McCourt brought to Angela’s Ashes and with the exuberant menace of a Martin Scorsese film. In Gowanus Crossing, Vincent Coppola captures a lost world in all its complicated glory.