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
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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