Despite some solipsistic meandering, a deft, amusing, and tough memoir.
A literary son traces his fugitive father in a pulpy yet cerebral memoir.
Novelist Di Prisco (The Alzhammer, 2016, etc.) roots this sequel to his previous memoir, Subway to California (2014), in his serendipitous discovery of a raft of trial transcripts concerning his father, a small-time criminal and gambling addict who helped crooked New York City cops shake down bookmakers and then testified against them, apparently receiving consideration for his own offenses. This explained the family’s flight during his childhood from Brooklyn to California but opened up numerous other questions for him. “My father didn’t exactly come out of nowhere, but it was close,” writes the author. “It was on the mean streets of Brooklyn in the hardscrabble fifties where he made his bones.” The memoir’s strongest aspect is this unsparing portrait of his family as a whirl of combative intensity. Although Di Prisco always saw his father as “unmanageable, impulsive, bottled-up, unhinged,” his volatile mother and his brother (who himself became a career criminal and heroin addict) considered him “a liar and a con man, a chump and a loser.” The author relies on the trial transcripts (and other primary sources such as family letters) to evoke both a vanished urban era and a seamy moral landscape of casual criminality: “All of us kids knew of the hit man who lived on the block.” Yet, despite his father’s lifelong gambling habit and tendency toward prevarication, he redeemed himself later in life as a labor union executive, winning nine consecutive elections: “He took pride in the job and worked very hard….His Brother Teamster leaders always spoke of him in laudatory terms.” This sprawling narrative is punctuated by Di Prisco’s reflections on literature, faith, mortality, and his own tangled romances and outré experiences, ranging from cocaine addiction to mentoring adolescents. When his father died after their relationship had finally stabilized, he wondered, “for whom, besides myself, am I writing this book?”
Despite some solipsistic meandering, a deft, amusing, and tough memoir.Pub Date: March 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-945572-11-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Rare Bird Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
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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