"Life for Donald Joel Aronow was a series of loud, abrupt noises. The backfires of the junked Cadillacs that he used to flip in 1930s Brooklyn, the orders barked when he joined the Merchant Marines in the ‘40s, the crack of a hammer on a construction site in 1950s New Jersey, or the smacking of his boat’s fiberglass hull against rough midnight waters when he devoted himself to offshore powerboating in the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s."