A spirited evocation of a complex immigrant culture, willing to show the scars its characters bear.
Three generations of an Italian-American family strive to assimilate in a lovingly imagined collection of linked stories.
Romano (When the World Was Young, 2007) focuses on the Comingo family, which arrives in Chicago shortly after World War II. Underachieving patriarch Fabio manages a barbershop with a dearth of customers. Headstrong mother Lucia offers heaping helpings of both food and no-nonsense wisdom, including the axiom that provides the book’s title. Son Giacomo is eager to escape his heritage; older brother Michelino proudly embraces it. Each family member speaks in the first person, a decision that could have produced clichéd, stereotypical prose. A pair of stories told in Lucia’s pidgin English do shade too far in that direction (“I no understand America. Is crazy”). But the author’s depth of feeling for his characters, combined with his ability to follow their subtle transformations through the decades, is affecting. The best-drawn character is Giacomo, or Jim (Americanization of names is a running theme). We follow him from after-school jobs to revelations about his mother to adulthood as a father and counselor—a job that, ironically, doesn’t let him escape his feelings of being smothered by Mom. At the center of the book are a series of bittersweet stories set during Lucia and Fabio’s courtship in Italy, revealing that their union was clumsy and, to an extent, unwanted. The climactic ending, in which multiple voices weave together, feels earned instead of mawkish. By the book’s close Romano has offered a wealth of details about jobs, heartbreak, religion and the business of making it in America. Though he doesn’t get into as much nitty-gritty about the Windy City as one of his obvious inspirations, Stuart Dybek’s The Coast of Chicago (1990), he effectively evokes the city’s ethnic life and the culture clashes it produces, both at the dinner table and out in the neighborhoods.
A spirited evocation of a complex immigrant culture, willing to show the scars its characters bear.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-085794-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2008
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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