*see pics, newspaper clipping if the author's obituary is included. *the dust jacket isnt in the best shape...but the book is pretty good. WELCOME TO THE BOOK BLANKET! NEW TO PANGOBOOKS? USE MY SPECIAL DISCOUNT CODE myantonia21 TO GET $5 OFF YOUR 1ST ORDER (OF $10 OR MORE). MY CODE WORKS WITH ANY SELLER. 😀 Questions? Want more pics? Want to make me a bundle $ offer? Shoot me a message and I'll respond quickly...I promise 😀 Every order includes stickers etc 😀 ******************************************* DORCHESTER BOY In this sequel to his 1973 bestseller The Making of a Psychiatrist, David S. Viscott returns to his own childhood to explain to himself, and to all his new public, how a child becomes an adult. Lying back on his own couch, he asks himself to remember everything he can about growing up in Dorchester in the '40s, when it was the center of the world, a Jewish Our Town whose Blue Hill Avenue was Main Street. As a psychiatrist, Viscott knows that memory retains the significant and winnows out the insignificant - even when what is retained may look like trivia. And as a writer, Viscott knows how to invest these memory fragments with the delight of his own discovery of them. Many of the memories are unpleasant. Happily, Viscott can now appreciate the humorous side of all his old fears and defeats, so that a certain mockheroic, bemused tone lets us know that this story ends happily. Viscott does not completely discount the old terrors, however. That would be unfair to the very sensitive and observant boy who experienced the traumas of making change in stores with strangers, or who took music lessons from "Old Watery Mouth," a teacher who sprayed instructions all over him, or who faced execution in the barber chair. There are other terrors. He is afraid of bakeries, "because they made you take numbers." His sister tells him he is adopted and that, late at night, her parents talk openly about sending him back. In school, he is relegated to The Jungle because of his sloppy handwriting (ah, now we understand why he became a doctor), and there is the further humiliation of trying to urinate while a small girl shrieks at him from the other potty and Mrs. teacher at his back commands him to hurry up. Worst of all, a best friend tells him that tunafish comes from seaworms. Fortunately, the friend, a seafood expert who had not brought lunch, "finished both my sandwiches." The terror that once existed in soiled coins and bakery numbers and haircuts and school washrooms and seaworms has now largely disappeared from Viscott's gentle, self-mocking account. Somewhere along the way he has learned how to laugh at himself and the world. This makes for delightful reading. He may be suggesting that if we all knew how to laugh, we would never need his other services.