A touching memoir that should resonate deeply with anyone yearning to connect with familial roots.
Paolantonio recounts her trips to Italy in search of her ancestry and a new life.
Born in 1959, the author, the daughter of two first-generation Americans of Italian descent, grew up mostly in Long Island, New York. Her paternal grandfather Nicola first traveled to the United States in 1907 to join his three older brothers there and fell in love with the country so deeply that he enthusiastically pushed his children and grandchildren to thoroughly assimilate; as a result, Paolantonio was raised somewhat disconnected from her Italian heritage. This was a void she looked to fill when she first traveled to his native town of Calitri, an “ancient hilltown” in eastern Campania. She would travel back many times thereafter; delightfully haunted by the “ghostly world of [her] ancestors,” she established relationships with both the paternal and maternal sides of the family. In this sweetly tender remembrance, the author, affectionately nicknamed L’Americana by her family, fell deeply in love with Calitri…and then with Giuseppe Zarrilli, “The Handsome Man from Macchiursi.” She also learned about the secretive life of Angela Maria, her mysterious grandmother, and even bought the home that was once hers in the village, making it and Calitri her own. (“I always felt deep down that someday I would find the spirit of my grandmother. Between my first journey and today there have been several years of discovery in this small mountain village that I now call home. After buying her house on via Fontana, I had finally found her.”) The author’s rediscovery of her lineage, and the dramatic way in which she embraced it, is related with humor and warmth in endearingly informal, even intimately confessional, prose. The memoir’s tone can veer into the earnestly sentimental (bordering on saccharine), but, in the main, this is an affecting recollection, conveyed with candor and poignancy.
A touching memoir that should resonate deeply with anyone yearning to connect with familial roots.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2016
ISBN: 9781537410913
Page Count: 300
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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