Way Too Fast: An American Reckoning: The Life and Music of Danny DeGennaro

Way Too Fast: An American Reckoning: The Life and Music of Danny DeGennaro

Way Too Fast, An American Reckoning: The Life and Music of Danny DeGennaro , is about a superbly talented musician from Levittown, Pennsylvania, who was brutally murdered in December of 2011. Danny’s story does not fit the tropes of our popular music literature. His was not the life of a world-famous rock star, like Keith Richards or Bruce Springsteen or Bob Dylan or Eric Clapton or David Bowie, whose autobiographies and overwrought hagiographies fill the shelves of libraries and Kindle inboxes; his life more closely resembles the lives that those more famous musicians sing about but don’t ever really live, their songs recounted at a comfortable distance from their subjects’ lives, particularly once fame and money have insulated them from the struggles of daily life. What took shape in the author's mind was the story of one man’s life, to be sure, but it was also a story of his time, of our time, the biography of a fading generation. It’s a story bounded by personal and generational loss but bridged by the sustaining power of friendship and the healing power of music.