A warm and honest memoir.
A sometimes-abrasive radio and TV personality’s unexpectedly touching memoir about “the best summer of [his] life.”
In the summer of 1974, 12-year-old Benza was “struggling with pimples and puberty” in a household dominated by his macho Sicilian father, Al. Then Benza’s uncle sent his 10-year-old boy, Gino—who he feared had the same gay tendencies as an older son—to live with his brother's family on Long Island. Al told Benza that their job that summer was to introduce the "brain damaged" Gino to fishing, sports, and girls. From the outset, the author realized he was fighting an uphill battle. Gino had never so much as stuck a toe in ocean water. Worse still, he ignored the women in Al’s Playboy magazines, sang the lyrics to tear-jerker pop ballads and Broadway musical songs, and knew more about Marilyn Monroe than he did about her baseball hero husband, Joe DiMaggio. And when Gino played kickball with Benza and the neighborhood boys, he demonstrated that he was as unable to catch or throw as he was to “field a grounder [even] if his life depended on it.” But the more the author and his family got to know the apparently hapless Gino, the more they accepted him for the sensitive, intelligent boy he was. He even won over Benza’s hypermasculine father, who not only protected the boy from the homophobia of neighborhood bullies, but also told him to stop taking the many pills his doctor father had prescribed for his “condition.” Benza’s depiction of how he, his father, and his cousin—who went home “beam[ing] with quiet confidence, resolve and inner freedom”—change is what is most satisfying about this book. That one family could make a difference in the life of a misunderstood boy and in turn be transformed by interactions with him is an uplifting message about the true nature of love.
A warm and honest memoir.Pub Date: July 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3878-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
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
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
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