The Three-Decker is the fast-moving, entertaining and uplifting memoir of a bright, ambitious Irish-Catholic schoolboy growing up in a Massachusetts mill town during the Presidency of John F. Kennedy.

Enthralled by the glamour and excitement of Kennedy’s Camelot, and inspired by the stirring challenge, “ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country,” this eager lad resolved to become a West Point cadet, both to answer his President’s clarion call to service, and also to escape from his life in a humble “three-decker” tenement house near Boston.

The Three-Decker is the story of a determined striver’s quest to negotiate the tortuous Congressional nomination process and gain acceptance to West Point — or one of the other armed forces officer scholarship programs — just as America was becoming embroiled in the Vietnam War.

Full of keen observation and wry humor, The Three-Decker will remind readers of Angela’s Ashes and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

This fast-paced memoir is packed with vivid descriptions of Boston in the nineteen-sixties, its downtown sidewalks teeming with office-workers, white-uniformed Navy sailors and black-robed Catholic nuns. Readers will enjoy a visit to the library to borrow Casino Royale (Jack Kennedy’s favorite novel) and a family trip to the drive-in theater to watch PT-109 on the wide screen.

The Three-Decker takes readers across the Atlantic in a propeller-driven Douglas DC-6, on a three-day Pullman train journey to Montana, and on a lurching, rattling streetcar ride on the Watertown Line of the infamous M.T.A. This thoughtful and revealing memoir also recounts its author's grueling personal battle against the most fearsome public health scourge of post-WWII America — polio. Readers will be thrilled when, on the very eve of his departure for college and the armed forces, the boy who has idolized Massachusetts’ fallen warrior-saint is unexpectedly and unforgettably entrusted with the greatest relic of John F. Kennedy’s Camelot.

Besides being entertaining reading, The Three-Decker provides a unique personal account of how the world’s dominant economic, military, and cultural society went about selecting, recruiting and educating the young people who could someday be relied upon to maintain America’s preeminence into the twenty-first century. The Three-Decker is one of the most exciting, entertaining and thought-provoking memoirs of the year.