Best suited for readers with a vested interest in Italy or Australia, or cultural comparisons in general.
A collection of anecdotes about the author’s life in Italy and Australia.
Some people never travel for from home, but the same can’t be said of author De Franco, who has lived in Italy and Australia and shares his experiences in both countries in this collection of incidents from his life. From one of his first memories as a young child—being spirited away by his father into the Italian forest to escape an Allied air raid in World War II—to the European Union’s receipt of the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize, De Franco discusses the people, events and experiences that have made an indelible impression on him across the decades of his life. His experiences run the gamut from the mundane, such as fetching cigarettes for adults as a young boy in Italy, to the exceptional, such as helping to build the world-famous Sydney Opera House in Australia. There is plenty of human drama as well, such as his story about his suicidal Italian boss or the ultimate fate—succumbing to lung cancer—of the friend to whom he brought cigarettes. Animal lovers may be turned off by the fact that every time the author takes care of one as a boy, it inevitably winds up on the dinner table. De Franco voices his own personal morality and opinions throughout, interspersing his book of humorous stories and anecdotes with statements like “…just the fact a man holds a Bible in his hand does not make him a Christian…” Sometimes this inclusion of serious and humorous within the same chapter becomes jarring, as readers must suddenly switch emotional gears. This well-written book works best when it marries De Franco’s personality—such as the detail that he barely spoke as a youngster due to an extreme case of shyness—to the incidents he is relating. The keenly observed cultural comparisons—particularly that of Italy after the war to the United States—also strike a poignant note. Still, the stories tend to blur together over the course of the book, representing the authenticity of a life lived but lacking the standout moments of a truly remarkable memoir.
Best suited for readers with a vested interest in Italy or Australia, or cultural comparisons in general.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2013
ISBN: 978-1493124060
Page Count: 132
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2014
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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