The Engineer From Brooklyn

Experience the days of kerosene lamps, horses and carriages, the Great Depression, World War II, the Space Age, and cyberspace, as seen through the eyes of Albert Moffitt and his large family of New York characters. Albert is a genius of a man, an electrical engineer who is equally at home sitting in a board meeting with top scientists, or sitting with his blue-collar neighbors playing poker in the backyards of Brooklyn. He has two great loves in his life. The first, a sweet blue-eyed lass, who comes along with a big, boisterous Irish family; the second, a beautiful, fiery Italian who would kill you if you disrespected her husband or her family. Albert teaches himself Chinese, Italian, and Yiddish, so he can speak to neighborhood storekeepers in their own language. His cellar workshop is strewn with wires, electronic components, a ham radio, a telescope, a microscope, half-finished inventions, and a Remington manual typewriter. On the wall hangs his Amateur Radio Operator License, his fishing license and a dried starfish from the Gaspe Peninsula. And there are meticulously cataloged rock collections, about which he will lecture to anyone within earshot until they beg for mercy. With five kids and only one bathroom, not too much money and a house full of visiting neighbors and salesmen, there’s humor, craziness, good times and bad, but most of all, a lot of love in this wide-ranging Brooklyn-American saga.