Not a bad first attempt from a non-professional writer looking to memorialize himself and those he loves.
The emotional author’s anxiety-ridden memories, as he struggles to find his place in the world–and in his family, following the deaths, 20 years apart, of his immigrant Sicilian paternal grandparents.
As a boy growing up in Queens, New York., Alaimo regularly escaped into the comfort of his deeply ingrained Catholicism in order to offset an inability to fit in to life outside his intensely religious Italian-American family. Uncomfortable with his looks and riddled with social angst, the young Alaimo was often so desperate to be anywhere but at school–where he was the subject of constant ridicule–that he regularly sought haven on weekdays in the dark recesses of Manhattan’s grand St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Sitting through as many as three Masses a day, he continued to light candles to the saints, begging them to deliver him from his travails. Only his beloved Nonna, around whom the story revolves, understands him. Her 1981 death from cancer is landmark, as is that of his Nonno, two decades later. It is only then, as a man, that Alaimo comes to terms with both himself and his family, finding the strength to deliver a passion-filled eulogy. The prose is heartfelt and intense, but also tends toward the melodramatic, relying often on laborious over-description for emphasis. At times, the author’s neediness becomes as tedious as the blow-by-blow descriptions of minor conversations and events. It’s also unclear why he relies frequently on a third-person description of himself. Nonetheless, the wonder of his dead grandmother’s visitations in his hours of need is inspiring, as is the evolution of his resolve to take control of his life.
Not a bad first attempt from a non-professional writer looking to memorialize himself and those he loves.Pub Date: June 19, 2006
ISBN: 0-595-38620-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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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