A sometimes-amusing, occasionally laugh-out-loud funny look at the life of a man who clearly isn’t down for the count quite...
Less a memoir than a collection of anecdotal tales told with humor and sass by retail-display designer Sarno.
Contrary to the book’s title, the author seems to have been fairly clear about what he wanted to do with his life from a young age. From his birth in 1936 through his childhood in Italian enclaves on Long Island, N.Y., and New Jersey, we follow his growing interest in sports and art. When he tossed aside a full scholarship to Parsons School of Design, it didn’t take him long to find a job in a department-store display department, which led to a long, satisfying career. Along the way we meet Sarno’s two wives and two children, the first of each disappearing as quickly as did Sarno’s father earlier in the book, and dozens of friends, relatives and associates who come and go with such rapidity that few stand out. Maybe Sarno missed his true calling—he clearly fancies himself a comedian—but his telling-rather-than-showing writing style fails to draw in readers. A strong editorial hand could have reined in his stream-of-consciousness style without doing any harm and would definitely have made the book easier to read. To hear Sarno tell it, nearly everything he touched turned to gold…until that last misstep on the six concrete steps that led to his downfall in more ways than one and gave him the time and inclination to turn his hand to storytelling. The author’s life—including his strong relationship with his son, his brushes with the Mob and even his incessant practical jokes—has the makings of an amusing, warm-hearted book. However, though he believes his life is instantly relatable, this is the type of book best shared with relatives and close friends.
A sometimes-amusing, occasionally laugh-out-loud funny look at the life of a man who clearly isn’t down for the count quite yet, despite his injuries.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2011
ISBN: 978-1463521110
Page Count: 276
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 27, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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