A subway ride with many stops, almost all of them interesting and entertaining.
A self-confessed “minor poet” and “novelist famous for his obscurity” reflects on his strange, eventful life.
“Stories happen,” writes Di Prisco (All for Now, 2012, etc.), “to people who can tell them.” Indeed. By age 36, the author had abandoned a novitiate, achieved minor celebrity as an undergraduate anti-war activist, suffered a string of failed romances with wholly unsuitable women (including fathering a son by a hippie chick who refused to marry him), managed a couple of restaurants in San Francisco and garnered a doctorate in English from Berkeley. On the way to completing his dissertation, he also developed an immoderate taste for alcohol, cocaine, gambling on sports and counting cards at blackjack tables. Di Prisco traces the reasons for his dance between decency and delinquency to his Brooklyn boyhood. A fearful, precocious child, the “perfect School Boy” grew up with three misfit brothers (all now dead) raised by two profane sociopaths in a home where the only set points on the volume control were “silence and screaming.” His Polish mother was a conniving, manipulative woman so egregious her own physician once remarked, “if she was my mother, I would have committed suicide.” She sliced up the author with lines like, “I had sons who died who loved me.” His Italian father was a small-time hustler and con man whose eventual pursuit by the FBI accounted for the family’s hasty 1961 escape to California. “Popey” puzzled and frustrated the young Di Prisco with cryptic advice like, “Don’t count your money in front of no windows.” The author can break your heart recalling the most romantic memory of his life or make you laugh out loud when, for example, he defines the Catholic notion of Limbo: “not a horrible place, not a great place, sort of like parts of Staten Island.”
A subway ride with many stops, almost all of them interesting and entertaining.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-940207-35-3
Page Count: 386
Publisher: Rare Bird Books
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
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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