Heartfelt and capably written, but a distinctly minor contribution to mob lit.
Or, Papa was an Al Capone.
Roy DeMeo was not a nice man. A loan shark and auto thief, he graduated to contract murder in the 1970s, becoming a capo of the Gambino family and racking up a toll of more than 200 victims. Yet, in the eyes of his young son Albert, “No one could have asked for a better father than mine. . . . He could pick me up and throw me around as effortlessly as a cotton ball, and he often did. . . . I wasn’t exactly sure what my father did for a living, and I didn’t care. I just liked being with him.” Gradually, he acquired more than a few inklings of what his father did in fact do for a living: the expensive gifts and $100 bills at his first communion and the looks of fear on neighbors’ faces eventually tipped Albert off, and adolescence brought more than the usual amount of rejection of the previous generation’s mores. After his father died—“shot seven times in the face and hands,” a helpful policemen tells Albert’s mother—and his old crew moved in to divide the spoils, Albert began to look more closely into his father’s life, seeking some explanation for who murdered him and why. Pressured by federal agents to cooperate in their investigation and turn informant, hounded by mobsters fearful that he would do just that, 18-year-old Albert developed bleeding ulcers and a profound dislike for the Mafia. Some of what he reveals in this so-so memoir will be of interest to students of organized crime, but there are many better insider accounts available; and while writing it must have been a cathartic experience, the reader will not forgive such mawkish moments as when Albert puts on a pair of his father’s old shoes and concludes, “I had my own shoes to wear, my own journeys to take.”
Heartfelt and capably written, but a distinctly minor contribution to mob lit.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2002
ISBN: 0-7679-0679-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2002
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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