A funny, infuriating, and engrossing tale of family betrayal and accord, though not quite reconciliation.
An idealistic, hardworking Italian-Canadian finally decides to defy his domineering father in this debut memoir.
DeLuca’s story actually starts with the immigration of his father, Giovanni, from Italy to the United States at age 16. Giovanni then slipped over the border to Canada after beating up a menacing, racist police officer. The fact that DeLuca even now doesn’t know the whole story sets the pattern for a nearly constant lack of communication between father and son. DeLuca and his brother toiled in Giovanni’s bakery, which became popular and successful, and yet it seemed that the two young men never had any money. DeLuca was sought after as a pastry chef, but he could never satisfy the arrogant Giovanni or win his affection. In his work, the author recalls his struggles to please this womanizing braggart while supporting his humiliated mother, until the day DeLuca walked away from the family business and his duties as a pastry chef for the rest of his life. Mocked by Giovanni, DeLuca worked in management at a “big box” bakery and married a divorcée, which scandalized his traditional relatives. Pulled in one direction by his obsessive desire to get even with Giovanni, in another by a wife who, having left her own difficult marriage, counseled her husband to quit trying to change his father, and haunted by guilt, DeLuca drew on his faith in God to strive for some sort of peace in the family. But not before his rage threatened to estrange him from the clan entirely. Action-oriented and heartfelt, this book offers an intriguing look at the difficult life of a self-employed baker. The 18 emotional chapters, each headed by a Bible verse (heavy on Psalms and Ecclesiastes, with one from Job), recount office politics, sexual temptations, unreasonable customers, and neighborhood loyalty. Giovanni is still alive, and in an Afterword, DeLuca decides to finally forgive his father. Toward the end of the memoir, the author’s list of grievances becomes rather histrionic and interrupts the story. While the squabbling remains episodic, DeLuca eventually shows maturity and delivers a sardonic self-assessment.
A funny, infuriating, and engrossing tale of family betrayal and accord, though not quite reconciliation.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5246-5963-9
Page Count: 108
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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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