So I just finished reading a book “Davy The Punk”, and I quite enjoyed it. It was an interesting look at the parts of “Toronto The Good” of the early to mid 20th century that you don’t hear much about. And because I’ve liked the author, Bob Bossin, as a folk musician and storyteller for many years, I thought I should write something about how much I enjoyed it.
But as I was thinking about it, I couldn’t separate out in my mind whether I liked the book because I liked Bob Bossin, or whether I liked the book on its own. And really, that seems like an important distinction if I were going to recommend this book to people who didn’t grow up hearing Stringband or seeing Bob Bossin at folk festivals. And I guess that’s the part of literary reviewing or literary criticism that’s harder than it looks.
So what it comes down to is what I can tell you about this book: it was written by Bob Bossin, mostly about his father Davy, who was a pivotal figure in the hidden (and not so hidden) gambling “underworld” of Toronto, with diversions into its connection to gambling and crime figures of New York and Chicago, as well as anecdotes about famous and infamous figures you’ve probably heard of and some you’ve never heard of. There’s some things a Trudeau Liberal such as myself finds hard to reconcile with my own worldview and belief in what Canada is and stands for, like the blatant anti-semitism of Canadian culture and government back then.
And all I can really advise you is, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, “If you like this sort of thing, this is just the sort of thing you’d like”.