This book details the author's Italian-American beginnings in the New York of the 1950s and the profound effect that his extended, working-class family has had on his life. So great has this effect been that, as the author ages, he finds he thinks less of the momentous history through which he has lived, or of the intellectual life he has enjoyed, than of some things far more permanent, profound, and primordial: the people and places he knew as a youth, and that knew him; the baseball he played, the movies he loved (and the movie stars he spotted), the teachers he revered; the English his family learned as well as the Italian he unlearned, or lost in translation; the Mafiosi he met and marked; and the religion of his youth that he abandoned, yet that did not abandon him. Cardullo knows that he can't go home again: all he can really do is think about it, which he does so eloquently in Straight Out of Brooklyn.