Fresh details, stand-up jokes and anecdotes compensate for the lack of smooth narrative flow.
A zany, erratic, painfully poignant memoir of growing up working class and gay in the Bronx during the ’60s and ’70s.
Actor/playwright Capotorto’s debut is based on his one-man show of the same title, a loose translation of his surname (torto = twisted; capo = boss or head). The gallery of nutty grotesques who inhabited his Italian-American family and neighborhood ran the gamut from his tyrannical, slave-driving father to his long-suffering mother and three sisters; an array of grandmas, aunts, cousins and teachers also peopled his lonely, awkward childhood. Capotorto’s father struggled to wrest a living from the off-the-beaten-path Cappi’s Pizza and Sangweech Shoppe near Pelham Parkway, but his strict house rules drove customers away. Cappi exercised a despotic rule over his family as well. He verbally abused everyone, censored all cultural activities and tracked down eldest daughter Rosette when she ran away to become a flower child. Once the Capotortos moved from their tiny apartment into a big house a block away, teenaged Carl spent his weekends toiling thanklessly for his father in the ramshackle building’s renovation. His cameo portraits of various sadistic public-school teachers are wickedly funny, as is his send-up of the “high theatrics” of the local Catholic church, St. Lucy’s. As the author became aware of his homosexuality, he sought out likeminded “misfits,” discovered disco, got involved in drama and experimented with sexual partners. Unsurprisingly, hiding his true nature from his father made him fearful and anxious. Cappi, who never really accepted his son, died of a heart attack in 1998.
Fresh details, stand-up jokes and anecdotes compensate for the lack of smooth narrative flow.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7679-2861-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2008
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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