2 new books about life in Queens

From the Times Ledger:

It was on the tree-lined streets of Kew Gardens that Dick Van Patten got his start as a child star who would go on to appear in hundreds of radio shows, two dozen films and seven television series, including the 1970s sitcom “Eight is Enough.”

Van Patten’s mother and longtime supporter, Josephine, would push him in a carriage through the streets of Kew Gardens and was frequently stopped by passersby who would urge her to bring her child into a modeling agency.

Van Patten describes growing up in Kew Gardens and Richmond Hill in the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s in his recently published memoir “Eighty Is Not Enough.” The book’s title is a reference to both the show, in which he became known to much of the world as the sitcom’s father, and his age.

Van Patten was born in Jamaica Hospital in 1928 and grew up in Kew Gardens and Woodhaven, where his mother had lived as a teenager. In the 272-page book, he relays many of his memories from Queens, including living on the first floor of a crowded home in Woodhaven, participating in a talent contest at the Willart Theater in Woodhaven and the death of a 7-year-old friend on the Long Island Rail Road tracks near his Woodhaven home.

From LA Times:

In his latest short-story collection, "A Good Fall," Jin continues his skillful and deeply felt exploration of immigrant conflicts. He focuses on a socioeconomically diverse cast of characters mostly living or working in the Queens, N.Y., neighborhood of Flushing. They include a healthcare aide trying to fend off advances from an old man with dementia without losing her job ("A Pension Plan"), a private SAT tutor embroiled in an inadvertent love triangle with his female student and her mother ("Choice") and a professor worried that a single misspelled word on his application will doom his tenure chances ("An English Professor"). A pervasive anxiety infects these lives. For these newcomers, both relationships and jobs seem precious, precarious things, often tied to one another, sometimes hanging by a thread.

Jin depicts Flushing as an immigrant purgatory, a refuge bounded by danger. Here English is not yet the common language, deportation remains a threat and old-country obligations -- a smuggler's payoff, a sister's e-mailed demand for money to buy a high-priced foreign car -- can impede fragile economic progress.