Once an Engineer: A Song of the Salt City

Joe Amato

mar 2010 · State University of New York Press

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Finalist for the 2009 ForeWord Book of the Year in the Autobiography/Memoir Category

Once an Engineer is a funny, tragic, garlicky chronicle of a dozen years spent growing up on the wrong side of the tracks. The tail end of the sixties finds Joe and his younger brother, Mike, living with their divorced and unemployed father in a low-income neighborhood on the edge of Syracuse, New York, a once prosperous city now down on its luck. Mike and Joe mature under their father's distinctively masculine tutelage, but their dreams of a better life are tempered by the harsh realities of public assistance.

When the brothers are offered the chance to attend college, they are drawn to the engineering profession, with its seductive promise of middle-class wages and social status. At the same time, their father's trade, furniture finishing, succumbs to a new era of industrial and economic change, and as the gap between father and sons widens, they come to learn the true costs of upward mobility.

Once an Engineer tells the story of three lives rooted in the moods and lore of Central New York, and the difficulty of finding meaningful work in a world gone inexorably, technologically global.

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Joe Amato is the author of two books of literary criticism and theory, Industrial Poetics: Demo Tracks for a Mobile Culture and Bookend: Anatomies of a Virtual Self; four volumes of poetry, Pain Plus Thyme, Under Virga, Finger Exorcised, and Symptoms of a Finer Age; and a novel, Big Man with a Shovel. He is a native of Syracuse, New York.