Da Gama, Cary Grant, and the Election of 1934

"The cotton mills of New Bedford have long since followed its whaling fleet into oblivion. Gone the ugly labor disputes and turf wars that once dominated the region's headlines. Dead the mill owners and operatives who spun gold from cotton. But by a literary miracle, not everyone who was witness to New Bedford's decline and fall has forgotten it. In his wonderful new novel, the octogenarian writer (and New Bedford native) Charles Reis Felix tells what it was like to be young and proud and poor and Portuguese in the city of 1934, while a quartet of ethnic Americans (including the Yankee incumbent) duke it out in a wild mayoral election. Generously observed, vividly drawn, and beautifully realized, the fictional city that he author evokes is a New Bedford to celebrate for all its faults-and to read about time and time again."—Llewellyn Howland III, author of The New Bedford Yacht Club: A History

"'The Portuguese are the unknown people,' declaims Secundo Alves. 'To be Portuguese in America is to be a stone dropped in the middle of the ocean.' Alves, one of Charles Reis Felix's colorful and memorable characters, may be overstating the case, but not by much. And Reis Felix, in his novel of vignettes, brings the Portuguese to life with wit and humor, and above all, with an eye for telling detail that any American writer-of any ethnicity-should envy. This book captures the nature of immigrant New Bedford in a way that will make it relevant and entertaining reading for decades to come!"—Frank X. Gaspar, author of Leaving Pico