The Last Fine Time

by Verlyn Klinkenborg

Book Overview

By turns, an elegy, a celebration, and a social history, The Last Fine Time is a tour de force of lyrical style. Verlyn Klinkenborg chronicles the life of a family-owned restaurant in Buffalo, New York, from its days as a prewar Polish tavern to its reincarnation as George & Eddie's, a swank nightspot serving highballs and French-fried shrimp to a generation of optimistic and prosperous Americans. In the inevitable dimming of the neon sign...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226443353
• ISBN13: 9780226443355
• Release Date: April 2004
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 209 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

If thin on plot, boundless in imagination

As many of the other comments have noted, this is, overall, a beautifully written book. There is a particularly sharp sequence describing how Eddie--a young, successful, good-looking, 2nd generation Polish pub owner--was seen by the east Buffalo community as a type of fulfillment of the immigrant dream (even though, as they lamented, he did not speak the mother tongue). Klinkenborg's reverie on the matter is masterful, as his roving eye and fine ear cherry-pick details out of this largely imagined past, telling how all the mothers and daughters were eager to put their unmarried daughters on display whenever the promising young man came around. I wish the famous "decline" of Buffalo, however, had been as well-dramatized. We do get one great chapter comparing the era to a man with one pant leg stuck in his sock--a little disheveled, trying its best to maintain appearances, secretly somehow aware of the crash that was just around the corner (the image of Niagara Falls is used similarly, as a metaphor for lurking doom, and even a certain nihilism: the Niagara River's waters flow past Buffalo, and in a sense they carry a part of Buffalo into a white abyss every second of every day). These images are wonderful as far as they go, but there must be an interesting story there to tell, about how the old Polish and young black communities struggled to co-exist on the East Side. All this--including the race riots on Buffalo's East side in the late 60s--is glossed over in a few pages. Or maybe the Poles and the blacks didn't "struggle" so much to co-exist at all: maybe there was simple hatred all around. One gets the sense reading the brief treatment of the subject that there was much about Eddie's feelings that could not be said with the decorum with which Klinkenborg feels at ease (Eddie is the author's real-life father-in-law).

Can't Say Enough About This Book

I started to (re-)read this book just one day before the untimely death of Tim Russert, which only made it more poignant. I was born in that very section of Buffalo myself (near Williams St. and S. Ogden - my mother was born on Lovejoy in the Sloan neighborhood), in the '50s, close enough to the era that I recognize the author got it exactly right. My father could have been Eddie, and his father, a Polish immigrant, could have been Tom, so to me this book is more than just a history. And from the very first line - "Snow starts as a rumor in Buffalo..." - to the end, it told honest truths.

Brilliant

The story of a Polish-American family running a business at Sycamore and Herman Streets, Buffalo, NY in 1947. A brilliantly written record of time and place, describing the unprecedented cultural transformation of Post WW II America. Probably one of my 10 favorite books I've ever written.

A Great Work About A Special and Forgotten Place and Time

I'm so glad to see this fine book back in print. I'd strongly recommend it to anyone with an interest in post WWII America, the contributions of the working class, the decline in the industrial economy, the urban to suburban shift or anyone with an appreciation of what a thriving place Buffalo was in the post WWII period. Pick up a copy before it disappears from print again! Klinkenborg does a masterful job of weaving all of these themes together and from this reader's standpoint it's as if he was there.

A battered queen

This is the best book ever written about Buffalo, the best book, fiction or nonfiction, that uses Buffalo as background. The decline of a proud city, enabled by its matter of fact certainty about destiny and greatness, is recounted with intelligence and a generous style. The sadness of change is inescapable, but people's memories, especially those of Polish Americans, create a light that still shines in the city's shadows.