Brooklyn is a mythic place and the Gowanus Canal, pestilent and fertile, is its Nile. "Yous stay outta that f*cking water," Uncle Honey used to warn us.

We never listened.

Mid-century Gowanus: Decades before the Whole Foods went up and the lofts were refurbished, a raucous, unruly, proudly Italian American enclave clings to the banks of the noxious canal. The Mafia and the Catholic Church--two centuries-old, rigidly hierarchical institutions defined by oppressive codes of silence--dominate the neighborhood.

In Gowanus Crossing, Vincent Coppola brings the world of his childhood ferociously to life. A second-generation Italian American, Coppola grew up in old Gowanus, a bookish kid for whom Park Slope, to say nothing of Central Park, might as well have been the moon. His journey through and eventually out of the neighborhood is harrowing, hilarious, and populated with a cast of characters who burst off the page: a four-foot-tall wiseguy who walks a lion on a leash, a predatory priest, mobbed-up undertakers, Coppola's three wayward brothers, and a host of assorted schemers, scammers, mobsters, bookies, gamblers, and certifiable crazies.

Combining Frank McCourt's gimlet eye with the exuberant menace of a Scorsese movie, Gowanus Crossing captures a lost world in all its glory.