Brian McDonald Reviews

Once upon a time, there was a very famous restaurant named Elaine’s. For forty years or so, Elaine’s proved to be that the beating heart--and crusted liver--of Manhattan’s literary scene. As a bartender in Elaine's for more than ten years, I had a front row seat to see some of non-fiction authors and the greatest novelists in their contemplative moments. I once saw Hunter S. Thompson put himself on fire drinking flaming shots of 151-proof Bacardi rum. We had to smother him with a tablecloth. When I began to think that perhaps I too could become a writer it had been that night, or one like it.

Considering that impertinent beginning, I have been able to build a small body of work that includes the acclaimed memoirs Last Call at Elaine's: a Journey From One Side of the Bar to another (St. Martin's Press 2008); and My Father's Gun: One Family, Three Badges, One Hundred Years in the NYPD (Dutton 1999). “My Father’s Gun” has been made into a award winning feature-length documentary aired on the History Channel (click arrow over for trailer).

More recently, I’ve ghostwritten or acted as a book physician on a half dozen successfully published memoirs and collaborated with Malachy McCourt about the newly published: Death Need Not Be Performed (Hachette, May 2017), a humorous and poignant memoir of facing the Great Hereafter.

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