It could have been better told, but this horrifying story reveals myriad facets of human brutality.
Michigan journalist Tintori (Trapped: The 1909 Cherry Mine Disaster, 2002, etc.) recovers the tragic life of her great-aunt Francesca, murdered at age 16 by her own brothers.
In 1993, the author found an old family passport with a scratched-out name: Francesca Costa. “That’s the one they got rid of,” her Aunt Grace said. When she realized Tintori knew nothing about it, she refused to say more. Older relatives grudgingly, sometimes hostilely, revealed as little as possible—and then changed their stories. But the author persevered, reading everything she could about the Costas’ native Sicily; about Detroit, where the family settled in 1914 when Francesca was ten; about the Mafia, with which some of the Costas were connected; and about the male-dominated Sicilian culture that confined women to silence and servitude. Tintori eventually realized she would never uncover the facts. Francesca’s father and her vicious older brothers had tried to obliterate all traces of her; the author found only a single photograph and a birth certificate. She settled on a scenario that made most sense to her: Pledged by her father to marry a man other than the one she loved, Francesca instead ran away, married her lover and was brutally executed in 1919 when she returned to reconcile with her family, which perversely believed these actions cleansed its soiled honor. Tintori contends that Rocco and Pasquale Costa disfigured their sister, then drowned her at Belle Isle in the Detroit River. There was no missing-person report, no official investigation; omertà, the code of silence, prevailed. The narrative, a series of abrupt jump cuts, leaps from Sicily to Detroit, from 1900 to 1990, from Francesca’s life to her own. Some chapters are barely a page long; others are rambling. The author is prone to clichés and banalities, like the counterpoising of her own childhood fear of water with Francesca’s watery death.
It could have been better told, but this horrifying story reveals myriad facets of human brutality.Pub Date: July 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-312-33463-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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