A witty and thoughtful account that’s a portrait of the mother-daughter bond as much as it is a search for love.
A baby boomer reflects on her Bronx childhood and coming-of-age in this debut memoir.
Santarelli always had an eye for details. As she and her second husband stood waiting for the train to New York City one cold January morning, she noticed the clothing, demeanor, and style of a woman her age. Her sharp observations had been with her since childhood, which she spent in the Bronx with her older brother, Stephen, and Jewish mother after her father left. Santarelli quickly became an outsider, struggling with school, her mean neighbor Kathy, and a witch of a teacher. Her mother tried to angle her way up the social ladder, befriending Mary the socialite and imparting a love of life’s finer things to her only daughter. Santarelli trudged through school, deciding along the way that she wanted to be a nurse. Her brother suffered, and survived, a harrowing ordeal with a brain aneurysm. After nursing school, she embarked on her nursing career and met her first husband, a pharmacist. They married, had children, and enjoyed upward mobility until financial trouble cast a dark pall over their Tudor home. While they survived that rocky period, a newfound love of cycling introduced her to Nick, and an unexpected chapter of her life began to unfold. While this promises to be a memoir of excess, it’s mostly a memoir of details, with beautiful descriptions of furniture, neighborhoods, and memories. The book’s best drawn character is the author’s mother, “destined to be different even before the divorce.” The 1950s and ’60s are evoked in various cultural markers, from the assassination of President John F. Kennedy to “peasant shirts and long Indian print, gauzy skirts.” While the adulthood chapters lack the evocative language used to paint Santarelli’s childhood, the drama alone (a broken engagement, angry creditors, infidelity) can keep the reader engaged. The narrator’s triumphant training as a cyclist makes for a lovely conclusion and happy ending to a story that shares so many struggles. This book should certainly be of interest to readers of the author’s generation.
A witty and thoughtful account that’s a portrait of the mother-daughter bond as much as it is a search for love.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63152-258-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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