Describes with a natural ease the vigilance necessary to keep the faith, value life, and live in the present.
Just when debut memoirist Sorrentino was thrilled with his new life in New York City, his father became paralyzed from the chest down, and the author returned to his conservative little hometown.
Sorrentino offers a very tender story, if increasingly fraught, about the Christmas he went to spend with his family in West Long Branch, New Jersey, after which he didn’t return to his NYC apartment for four years. That Christmas Eve was back in 1980, when the writer was 24. Whether or not a quarter-century distance has beveled his perspective, his sense of humor, and responsibility seems abiding and indelible. The Sorrentinos were a delightfully functional family, a liberal bunch in a Republican town, who had worked hard, had their ups and downs, but kept an even keel and maintained strong ties to a wide and local network of kin. Steven decides to stay and run the family’s luncheonette, a recent purchase of his father’s after his investment business went kaput in the downturn of the 1970s. It was a sacrifice, but never a question. Sorrentino had just moved to New York, where he was as happy as he could possibly be pursuing his career in musical theater and his gay love life. (His sexual orientation was apparently always an open secret in the family, though the rest of the town “didn’t seem to notice that the Sorrentino boy [then age eight] was having a little too much fun in his mother’s sling-backs.”) In tones warm, tart, and exasperated, Sorrentino chronicles his days getting to know the business and its regulars, watching as his father’s health swung up, then deteriorated, and assuming civic responsibilities while suffering the loss of career and love. These losses blossomed into a very real crisis, yet in recounting them the author manages to wink at the past rather than stare at it.
Describes with a natural ease the vigilance necessary to keep the faith, value life, and live in the present.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-072892-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 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
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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