A hearty, bittersweet familial chronicle of masculinity drawing on the underappreciated bond between fathers and sons.
A loving son reflects on life with a brawny father whose premature death permanently transformed him.
AGNI fiction editor and New Republic contributing writer Giraldi (Hold the Dark, 2014, etc.) paints himself as an “earnestly unjockish” adolescent who looked up to his muscular father for direction, advice, and as the ultimate example of raw masculinity. Raised solely by his father in working-class, blue-collar Manville, New Jersey, the author writes earnestly about his closet affinity for classic literature and mounting frustration at his inability to measure up to his father’s macho image. Craving the “sacral creed” of masculinity that seemed to power the town (and his male-dominated family), a spontaneous visit to his uncle Tony’s makeshift workout room drastically altered his perspective, priorities, and physique. He eventually joined the hard-core training circuit culture at the Physical Edge gym, the local “sanctum of the gargantuan.” Bodybuilding became an “obsession that included brutalizing workouts, steroids, competitions, an absolute revamping of the self.” Thankfully, this hardened intensity doesn’t strip Giraldi’s memoir of its personality. His adventures with body shaving, maddening diet regimens, the “fetishizing pleasure” of hoarding steroids, and bodybuilding competitions all provide moments of wry humor and steely determination. His interest in bodybuilding deflated once the gym closed its doors and the author’s father sold the family home to move in with a girlfriend. Giraldi poignantly ponders his father as a man morphing through the decades from a levelheaded, reliable family man to a “harebrained...high-stakes gambler” and a devotee of treacherous motorcycle racing. His father experienced many nonfatal crashes, but one would take his life in 2000 at 47. The details of his tragedy become blurred with accusations and unsettled with inconclusiveness from an anterior-mounted camera inexplicably vanishing from the scene of the accident. Giraldi provides a respectful homage to his father, who died “attempting to be worthy of an ancient code,” but he also pays tribute to the working-class male and the unspoken codes of machismo.
A hearty, bittersweet familial chronicle of masculinity drawing on the underappreciated bond between fathers and sons.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-87140-666-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: May 7, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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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