“When you’re in the middle of the shit, it’s hard to keep it all straight,” writes Giovino, who’s clear-eyed enough now to...
An organized-crime woman recounts her “illegal, immoral, and unethical activities” in a fashion that will make readers’ hair stand on end, then fall out altogether.
“In 1992, when I was faced with a set of circumstances that was spiraling out of control and threatening my future and my kids’ futures, I resorted to what I knew best—loan-sharking and my family.” Well, 1992 wasn’t really the start of it, for Giovino had been involved with organized crime from an early age. Raised poor in Brooklyn, her mother helped run a Gambino family gaming club and taught seven-year-old Andrea, one of ten children, how to steal morning deliveries of bread to help feed the family. While Giovino tells her story in an edgy, no-prisoners tone (“I stormed into the kitchen, shoved Johnny aside, and got in Michael’s face, ‘Where are my kids, you fucking sick bastard’ ”), the voice of coauthor Brozek emerges in the uncharacteristically snippy asides (“I was no great student, and the calculus of human interaction was going to be my course of study”). From her first encounters with a wiseguy (“You think I’m gonna let you come into my apartment and have sex with me while my kid is up there sleeping, you piece of shit scumbag?”) through a succession of men who traded in absurd quantities of drugs, Giovino’s choices have brutal consequences. She successfully conveys their appeal—“I was addicted to the kind of high that came with being with these guys”—and reminds us that when you’ve been stone-cold poor, “money is a wonderful painkiller . . . after a while, I was beyond comfortably numb.” When the DEA arrested her, pressuring her boyfriend to cooperate with them, Giovino finally took responsibility for her life and straightened out. She now lives, under her own name, in rural Pennsylvania.
“When you’re in the middle of the shit, it’s hard to keep it all straight,” writes Giovino, who’s clear-eyed enough now to tie her story into a neat, terrible bundle.Pub Date: May 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7867-1355-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2004
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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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