“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
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
