Gravano’s dishy tell-all about growing up in the shadow of her father, Sammy "The Bull" Gravano.
The author, a star of the VH1 reality-TV show Mob Wives, delivers a memoir that's the literary equivalent of reality TV. Now 39, Gravano grew up in Brooklyn, where her father worked in construction, ran nightclubs and served as the Gambino family underboss. Much of what Gravano recalls qualifies hers as a healthy, happy girlhood. Married, her parents insisted on regular family dinners during which everyone would share something they'd learned that day. The other part, though, concerning how she came to understand her father's role in the mafia and what it meant for her family, stands in stark contrast to anyone's idea of a normal childhood. She knew from a young age that her father was a criminal, but her fierce loyalty to him has never wavered and her perspective is decidedly one-sided: "Seeing my father upset made me feel like the cops were the bad guys." At another point, after witnessing his fight with a landscape designer, Gravano writes, "My father was very fair when it came to the bottom line, and he expected the people he dealt with to be honest and reasonable as well." The author’s worship of her father makes her views on the man read as somewhat delusional, especially considering his lengthy criminal history. Readable but neither scintillating nor illuminating.
Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-250-00305-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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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