A poignant and poetic memoir of an American woman's life in Parma, Italy. In 1981, less than a year after her marriage to an Italian biology professor, Wilde-Menozzi (with her six-year-old daughter) followed her husband back to his native city of Parma. As a poet, short-story writer, and translator, Wilde-Menozzi is almost painfully conscious of the long and glorious tradition of expatriates who took root in Italy: The spirit of that great exile James Joyce seems, in particular, to pervade the book. In some ways, her work is reminiscent of the English writer Tim Parks, who settled in Verona and wrote Italian Neighbors (1992) and An Italian Education (1995) about his life there. But while Parks writes with ironic detachment, Wilde-Menozzi is passionate, sensuous, even fierce, whether dealing with the initial dilemma of relinquishing her freedom and following her husband to Italy (the words ``follow him,'' she writes, ``link me to all the Ruths that ever were'') or comparing her own ``bland and boring'' childhood with the chaotic intensity of her husband's family. Life, death, politics, language, art, books, food, and love commingle on the page. The author's sojourn in Italy becomes the catalyst for intensive soul-searching, which refracts off the page in marvelous images: She speaks of coffee reaching ``a noisy orgasm in the espresso pot.'' Discussing bread's centrality in Italian life, she celebrates it as ``a sacred gift''; whether it is ``fresh, stale, hanging on, filling bitter hunger, nourishing hopes, crusty and chewable,'' bread is ``sometimes all there is.'' Evocative and moving. (27 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: June 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-86547-501-6
Page Count: 373
Publisher: North Point/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1997
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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