“When you’re in the middle of the shit, it’s hard to keep it all straight,” writes Giovino, who’s clear-eyed enough now to...
An organized-crime woman recounts her “illegal, immoral, and unethical activities” in a fashion that will make readers’ hair stand on end, then fall out altogether.
“In 1992, when I was faced with a set of circumstances that was spiraling out of control and threatening my future and my kids’ futures, I resorted to what I knew best—loan-sharking and my family.” Well, 1992 wasn’t really the start of it, for Giovino had been involved with organized crime from an early age. Raised poor in Brooklyn, her mother helped run a Gambino family gaming club and taught seven-year-old Andrea, one of ten children, how to steal morning deliveries of bread to help feed the family. While Giovino tells her story in an edgy, no-prisoners tone (“I stormed into the kitchen, shoved Johnny aside, and got in Michael’s face, ‘Where are my kids, you fucking sick bastard’ ”), the voice of coauthor Brozek emerges in the uncharacteristically snippy asides (“I was no great student, and the calculus of human interaction was going to be my course of study”). From her first encounters with a wiseguy (“You think I’m gonna let you come into my apartment and have sex with me while my kid is up there sleeping, you piece of shit scumbag?”) through a succession of men who traded in absurd quantities of drugs, Giovino’s choices have brutal consequences. She successfully conveys their appeal—“I was addicted to the kind of high that came with being with these guys”—and reminds us that when you’ve been stone-cold poor, “money is a wonderful painkiller . . . after a while, I was beyond comfortably numb.” When the DEA arrested her, pressuring her boyfriend to cooperate with them, Giovino finally took responsibility for her life and straightened out. She now lives, under her own name, in rural Pennsylvania.
“When you’re in the middle of the shit, it’s hard to keep it all straight,” writes Giovino, who’s clear-eyed enough now to tie her story into a neat, terrible bundle.Pub Date: May 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7867-1355-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2004
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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