Oh, Play That Thing

Summary

Two years after walking out of Dublin with little more than the boots on his feet, Henry Smart has tossed his passport into New York Harbor and reinvented himself as an American. With a well-cut suit and a pearl gray fedora, Henry is by turns a marketing impresario, jazz enthusiast, and partner in crime as he skips from New York to Chicago and back again, only steps ahead of the death warrant that followed him across the Atlantic. At once a history of immigrants and other "outsiders" in America during the 1920s, a glimpse into the rise of Chicago jazz, and a meditation on survival during the Great Depression, Oh, Play That Thing is both a saga unto itself and a magnificent follow-up to A Star Called Henry.