The Uniform - (World Prose) by George Guida (Paperback)

About the Book

"The year is 1950. A brutal racist attack drives Alfie Bagliato's family from their small town to New York City, where, at sixteen, Alfie dreams of escaping his Italian American enclave through a career in music and a romance with his distant cousin, Adeline. Soon enough, disappointment and frustration lead Alfie to join the military, to follow Adeline to San Francisco, and then to become a New York City cop, whose clash with protestors during the 1968 Columbia University student uprising nearly kills him, forcing him to confront his inherited bigotry and fear, as he wrestles with his lingering love for Adeline and need to find a new life."--

Book Synopsis

The year is 1950. A brutal racist attack drives Alfie Bagliato's family from their small town to New York City, where, at sixteen, Alfie dreams of escaping his Italian American enclave through a career in music and a romance with his distant cousin, Adeline. Soon enough, disappointment and frustration lead Alfie to join the military, to follow Adeline to San Francisco, and then to become a New York City cop, whose clash with protestors during the 1968 Columbia University student uprising nearly kills him, forcing him to confront his inherited bigotry and fear, as he wrestles with his lingering love for Adeline and need to find a new life.

Review Quotes

The Uniform is a great dark novel of sharp, bright, often beautiful prose. The writing harkens back to a time when writing was literature. It's lit by its great energy and intelligence.

--Anthony Valerio, author of John Dante's Inferno and Valentino and the Great Italians

George Guida's novel The Uniform explodes open with the 1968 protest on the Columbia University campus, telling it viscerally from the cops' perspective. Alfie, our protagonist, is one of the cops. We experience exactly how those cops feel about privileged kids destroying what they, the cops, can't aspire to, a place in the larger world. That frustration tells us so much about all that isn't available to Alfie or anyone like him.

--Joanna Clapps Herman, author of The Anarchist Bastard and No Longer and Not Yet

George Guida's The Uniform is a powerfully ambitious, sweeping - even epic - novel that snatches you by the lapels from its first incendiary sentence and never relaxes its grip. It's the story of Alfie Bagliato, a boy who yearns for a better life, as a musician, away from his old world Italian American family. When Alfie's dream is thwarted, he finds himself in the cauldron of the military, then a New York City cop, strangled by racial violence and his own unresolved bigotry. Guida authenticates with wit and masterfully imaginative, often operatic, prose every syllable he writes. He knows his inimitable characters, the jacked-up rebop and rhythm of the streets they wander. His ear is flawless, his thin-lipped wise-cracking dialogue brilliant. The Uniform is a great big novel - in so many ways - and a wildly intriguing love story in the bargain. Unforgettable!

--Joseph Bathanti, North Carolina Poet Laureate & author of The Act of Contrition

These pages are a roundhouse to the jaw of every stock idea that cops are a body, singular in their values and experiences. In The Uniform, the Blue Line is indeed thin, and the other side is a novel-long trip through the eyes of a man who works hard to shape himself. Guida elevates shattering violence to poetry, shows history through the daily grind, and creates a complex protagonist who, like all human heroes, can never put away his past.

--Adam Berlin and Jeffrey Heiman, Editors, J Journal: New Writing on Justice

About the Author

George Guida is the author of eight books, including The Pope Stories and Other Tales of Troubled Times, four collections of poems--the forthcoming Pugilistic and The Sleeping Gulf, along with New York and Other Lovers and Low Italian--and the novel Letters from Suburbia. His work has appeared in many journals and anthologies. He teaches English and creative writing at New York City College of Technology, and serves as Poetry Editor of 2 Bridges Review.