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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.
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Reviews
"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 a
Adam Berlin and Jeffrey Heiman, Editors, J Journal: New Writing on Justice
"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
Joseph Bathanti, North Carolina Poet Laureate & author of The Act of Contrition
"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
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