Love stories are easy targets, but no one will scoff at the genuine and cheering affection depicted so generously here.
A luxurious story of sudden love, done properly, from cook/journalist de Blasi (Regional Foods of Northern Italy, not reviewed, etc.).
Middle-aged and divorced, with two grown children, living in St. Louis (Missouri, that is), de Blasi goes to Venice and meets the gaze of a man while having a drink in a restaurant with friends. He asks her for a rendezvous, and she agrees, unexpectedly, touched by the same whatever that has moved him. The rest is history, and a great story. The man, Fernando—no smooth-talker, a bit of a frump, awkward, yet a romantic—comes for a weeklong visit to St. Louis, and by the time he leaves, de Blasi has promised to move to Venice to be with him. She has few second thoughts, and her friends urge her on: “If there is even the possibility that this is real love,” one of them asks her, “could you dare to imagine turning away from it?” She doesn't, and what follows are the next 1,000 days, her game immersion in Italian culture to her wedding to their move south to Tuscany. De Blasi relates it all in a voice at once worldly and sensuous, unsentimental and aware of what it means to have such good fortune. Not all is as rosy as the Venetian morning light, though; she suffers a loss of her natural ebullience, “the quick strangling of spontaneity for the sake of a necessary deception that Italians call ‘elegance’,” though she doesn't allow it to dampen her vitality, nor does she let Fernando—who eats like a bird and whose kitchen is “a cell with a Playskool stove”—diminish her love of food. Rather, she binds her love of Fernando to her love of food, like a bouquet garni, in one long delicious engagement running throughout this ode, from cappuccino and apricot pastry to pumpkin gnocchi in cream and sage.
Love stories are easy targets, but no one will scoff at the genuine and cheering affection depicted so generously here.Pub Date: June 7, 2002
ISBN: 1-56512-321-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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