Mild lessons and anecdotes from a Chicago man who lifted himself from the middle class.
Worker’s compensation lawyer Garofalo recounts his life and law practice in Chicago.
Born on the North Side of Chicago in 1952, Garofalo grew up in a small, one-bathroom house. His grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins all lived on the same small lot in the house in back. After Garofalo’s draft number didn’t come up during the Vietnam War, he finished school, married his childhood sweetheart, and graduated in 1977 from DePaul University School of Law. Afterward, Garofalo survived a brief stint in real estate law until discovering during a foreclosure that he possessed what few in his profession seem to have: a heart and a soul. He quit his job and found a position as an associate at the Chicago law firm of Gifford, Detuno & Gifford, Ltd., where he represented employers in worker’s compensation cases. It was a life-changing association in which he found a common bond among the members of a local bar association dominated by Italian-Americans and a field in which he excelled. Recalling his early life, Garofalo remembers his parents’ divorce two years after their marriage and how his grandfather became his surrogate father. He remembers his grandfather’s service in World War I and his grandfather’s belief that war was “a cruel joke played on mankind….The only thing you could do to survive war was to laugh at it.” Garofalo uncovered his Italian roots, explored winemaking, traveled to Italy, and purchased a vineyard in California. However, after achieving wealth and success, Garofalo concludes that “we all are connected” and ultimate joy is derived from caring for one another. Garofalo’s memoir is filled with personal stories and lessons learned from the dozens of individuals who influenced him as a lawyer and husband. The text is reflective, if intensely personal, supplemented by dozens of black-and-white photographs straight from the family photo album. In particular, stories of his near-death experiences are memorable in what is an otherwise fairly plain account of a good, ordinary life.
Mild lessons and anecdotes from a Chicago man who lifted himself from the middle class.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-1500605056
Page Count: 332
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 24, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A unique, incandescent memoir.
A lyrical, soul-stirring memoir about how an acclaimed Native American poet and musician came to embrace “the spirit of poetry.”
For Harjo, life did not begin at birth. She came into the world as an already-living spirit with the goal to release “the voices, songs, and stories” she carried with her from the “ancestor realm.” On Earth, she was the daughter of a half-Cherokee mother and a Creek father who made their home in Tulsa, Okla. Her father's alcoholism and volcanic temper eventually drove Harjo's mother and her children out of the family home. At first, the man who became the author’s stepfather “sang songs and smiled with his eyes,” but he soon revealed himself to be abusive and controlling. Harjo's primary way of escaping “the darkness that plagued the house and our family” was through drawing and music, two interests that allowed her to leave Oklahoma and pursue her high school education at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. Interaction with her classmates enlightened her to the fact that modern Native American culture and history had been shaped by “colonization and dehumanization.” An education and raised consciousness, however, did not spare Harjo from the hardships of teen pregnancy, poverty and a failed first marriage, but hard work and luck gained her admittance to the University of New Mexico, where she met a man whose “poetry opened one of the doors in my heart that had been closed since childhood.” But his hard-drinking ways wrecked their marriage and nearly destroyed Harjo. Faced with the choice of submitting to despair or becoming “crazy brave,” she found the courage to reclaim a lost spirituality as well as the “intricate and metaphorical language of my ancestors.”
A unique, incandescent memoir.Pub Date: July 9, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-393-07346-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2012
SEEN & HEARD
Riveting and exquisitely crafted.
Musician, poet and visual artist Smith (Trois, 2008, etc.) chronicles her intense life with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe during the 1960s and ’70s, when both artists came of age in downtown New York.
Both born in 1946, Smith and Mapplethorpe would become widely celebrated—she for merging poetry with rock ’n’ roll in her punk-rock performances, he as the photographer who brought pornography into the realm of art. Upon meeting in the summer of 1967, they were hungry, lonely and gifted youths struggling to find their way and their art. Smith, a gangly loser and college dropout, had attended Bible school in New Jersey where she took solace in the poetry of Rimbaud. Mapplethorpe, a former altar boy turned LSD user, had grown up in middle-class Long Island. Writing with wonderful immediacy, Smith tells the affecting story of their entwined young lives as lovers, friends and muses to one another. Eating day-old bread and stew in dumpy East Village apartments, they forged fierce bonds as soul mates who were at their happiest when working together. To make money Smith clerked in bookstores, and Mapplethorpe hustled on 42nd Street. The author colorfully evokes their days at the shabbily elegant Hotel Chelsea, late nights at Max’s Kansas City and their growth and early celebrity as artists, with Smith winning initial serious attention at a St. Mark’s Poetry Project reading and Mapplethorpe attracting lovers and patrons who catapulted him into the arms of high society. The book abounds with stories about friends, including Allen Ginsberg, Janis Joplin, William Burroughs, Sam Shepard, Gregory Corso and other luminaries, and it reveals Smith’s affection for the city—the “gritty innocence” of the couple’s beloved Coney Island, the “open atmosphere” and “simple freedom” of Washington Square. Despite separations, the duo remained friends until Mapplethorpe’s death in 1989. “Nobody sees as we do, Patti,” he once told her.
Riveting and exquisitely crafted.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-621131-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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