A warm and honest memoir.
A sometimes-abrasive radio and TV personality’s unexpectedly touching memoir about “the best summer of [his] life.”
In the summer of 1974, 12-year-old Benza was “struggling with pimples and puberty” in a household dominated by his macho Sicilian father, Al. Then Benza’s uncle sent his 10-year-old boy, Gino—who he feared had the same gay tendencies as an older son—to live with his brother's family on Long Island. Al told Benza that their job that summer was to introduce the "brain damaged" Gino to fishing, sports, and girls. From the outset, the author realized he was fighting an uphill battle. Gino had never so much as stuck a toe in ocean water. Worse still, he ignored the women in Al’s Playboy magazines, sang the lyrics to tear-jerker pop ballads and Broadway musical songs, and knew more about Marilyn Monroe than he did about her baseball hero husband, Joe DiMaggio. And when Gino played kickball with Benza and the neighborhood boys, he demonstrated that he was as unable to catch or throw as he was to “field a grounder [even] if his life depended on it.” But the more the author and his family got to know the apparently hapless Gino, the more they accepted him for the sensitive, intelligent boy he was. He even won over Benza’s hypermasculine father, who not only protected the boy from the homophobia of neighborhood bullies, but also told him to stop taking the many pills his doctor father had prescribed for his “condition.” Benza’s depiction of how he, his father, and his cousin—who went home “beam[ing] with quiet confidence, resolve and inner freedom”—change is what is most satisfying about this book. That one family could make a difference in the life of a misunderstood boy and in turn be transformed by interactions with him is an uplifting message about the true nature of love.
A warm and honest memoir.Pub Date: July 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3878-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 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
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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