A generally engrossing narrative of class and mobility in urban America.
Freelance journalist Agovino’s debut investigates how people are shaped by the places they inhabit.
When Co-op City opened in the Bronx in 1968, this series of enormous towers was hailed as a worker’s paradise, a utopia, the future of urban housing in America. It was also called “eminently depressing,” “monumental in size, minimal in planning” and “relentlessly ugly.” Agovino moved to this mythical place with his Italian-American family on a wave of hope and apprehension. But their odyssey began years earlier, before the author’s birth, when his father Hugo had to flee East Harlem after forgetting to place a bet for a high powered “racket guy” who came looking for the money he would have won. Catastrophes, near-catastrophes and big wins would prove to be the defining themes in Hugo’s life. Gambling kept its hold on him after he married Cora from Brooklyn, after they had children, after they moved to Co-Op City and even after Hugo landed a job in the Department of Social Services. The family’s fortune rose and fell with each wave of luck in the bookmaking business he ran on the side. Agovino’s history is rich with the mythology of immigrant strivers, but with its own series of twists linked to his erudite, proud and reckless father. The book also offers a unique portrait of the mutability of class, as his parents visited the Uffizi in Florence after a good streak and fretted over making payments on their son’s tuition after a bad streak. Crafting a joint portrait, Agovino occasionally lets minutiae about his kin—precious when viewed from within, less so from without—overpower the more dramatic chronicle of Co-Op City. For the most part, however, he strikes a nice balance between the histories of a beloved place and a turbulent family.
A generally engrossing narrative of class and mobility in urban America.Pub Date: Aug. 19, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-115139-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 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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