Unfinished Lives
by
Book Details
About the Book
Tony Allante grows up in the city’s poolrooms, learning the language and behavior that make him cool and one of the guys. Mixing with his friends, he is able to become one of them while hiding the fear of having to fight to protect himself, the fear of knowing he’s a “chicken”. As he completes high school and enters college, his desires for moving up socially—marrying the “right” kind of girl, becoming a physician, earning enormous sums of money, moving out of the neighborhood—make him realize that he must forsake his unsophisticated boyhood friends and blighted neighborhood, without getting hurt in the process. But not before he gets what he wants from them.
Tony and his friends found The Phillipo Athletic and Social Club which is, in reality, an excuse for legally establishing a place to sell liquor and attract women. It is wildly successful, the club being filled every weekend with the loud, driving beat of their music, young women with the easy sexual mores of the late ‘60’s, heavy drinking that seems a part of most young people growing up, and a desire to have a good time while the getting is good. Tony takes full advantage of the situation, drinking with the best of them and making it with as many women as he could during the summer before he goes off to college again to pursue his goal of becoming a physician and, ultimately, breaking his relationships with his past.
But Tony’s goals are confused after he meets Jill, a beautiful young woman who, though she doesn’t meet his standards for the wife he’d planned, tests Tony’s blueprint and decisions for his future. Unwillingly and unwittingly, Tony finds himself falling hard and fast for Jill and even throws over Joanne for her, an act which has serious and unanticipated consequences—including murder and his being an unwitting causative factor in her own and a friend’s death.
Tony’s life doesn’t work out the way he’d planned. He doesn’t marry the girl of his dreams, doesn’t become wealthy, is unhappy in his work, and then, after 17 years, Jill calls him from out of the blue.
What does it all mean for Tony? What should he do? What will he do? Is this a chance to redeem himself and his mediocre life?
This is a story of young men and their women, healthy and full of life and its promises, of youthful sex and dreams, of the excesses committed while growing up and, finally, of how being untrue to yourself and others can ruin lives.
About the Author
Mike Antonaccio was born in 1943 in Yonkers, NY of immigrant Italian parents where he attended public schools up through Yonkers High School. He selected Duquesne University for his undergraduate studies where he received his B.S. in Pharmacy in 1966. He went on to the University of Michigan, receiving his Ph.D. in Pharmacology in 1970. He has worked for both large and small pharmaceutical companies, including Schering-Plough, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Human Genome Sciences. He was both an active researcher with over 250 published scientific papers and abstracts, as well as an executive officer in several companies, including Senior Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer, having broad experience in drug discovery, clinical research, new drug project management and regulatory affairs with the Food and Drug Administration. Married to Patty Antonaccio, he currently resides in New Hope, PA.