In this memoir Torgovnick (English/Duke Univ.) proves herself to be a rare breed: a cultural critic who writes lucidly and perceptively not only about her chosen texts, but about herself. The first half of the book consists of autobiographical essays on crossing boundaries of class, religion, education, and place, as an Italian-American woman. Torgovnick grew up in Bensonhurst, a working-class, predominantly Italian-American neighborhood in Brooklyn, N.Y. Ocean Parkway, which divides Bensonhurst from Sheepshead Bay (the middle-class, Jewish neighborhood into which she eventually married), symbolized upward mobility and the possibilities of life beyond the confines of her insular world. These essays describe her experiences as an academically successful girl in a community where intellectual expectations for girls were low; later, as a professor in a Waspy college town, she also felt herself an outsider. The book's latter half consists of essays of cultural criticism, on Italian-American icons such as The Godfather, as well as other American literary institutions—Dr. Dolittle, critic Lionel Trilling, and the canon. Torgovnick writes her critical pieces in the same intimate, personal voice she uses in the memoirs. Throughout, she is willing to revise and add complexity to her own narratives. In an epilogue on her father's death, for instance, she reflects that, although she felt that she was rebelling against him in ``crossing Ocean Parkway''—marrying Jewish, going to college, and moving out of the neighborhood—he may have been more of an ally than she had thought. He protested when she skipped grades in school, yet he also gave her books, took her into the city, and was a model of gender rebellion—pulling down the shades so the neighbors couldn't see him doing housework. Torgovnick's scholarly background and life experience inform her readings of both American culture and her own past; she has found an essayist's voice that is very much her own.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-226-80829-7
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
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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