A generally engrossing narrative of class and mobility in urban America.
Freelance journalist Agovino’s debut investigates how people are shaped by the places they inhabit.
When Co-op City opened in the Bronx in 1968, this series of enormous towers was hailed as a worker’s paradise, a utopia, the future of urban housing in America. It was also called “eminently depressing,” “monumental in size, minimal in planning” and “relentlessly ugly.” Agovino moved to this mythical place with his Italian-American family on a wave of hope and apprehension. But their odyssey began years earlier, before the author’s birth, when his father Hugo had to flee East Harlem after forgetting to place a bet for a high powered “racket guy” who came looking for the money he would have won. Catastrophes, near-catastrophes and big wins would prove to be the defining themes in Hugo’s life. Gambling kept its hold on him after he married Cora from Brooklyn, after they had children, after they moved to Co-Op City and even after Hugo landed a job in the Department of Social Services. The family’s fortune rose and fell with each wave of luck in the bookmaking business he ran on the side. Agovino’s history is rich with the mythology of immigrant strivers, but with its own series of twists linked to his erudite, proud and reckless father. The book also offers a unique portrait of the mutability of class, as his parents visited the Uffizi in Florence after a good streak and fretted over making payments on their son’s tuition after a bad streak. Crafting a joint portrait, Agovino occasionally lets minutiae about his kin—precious when viewed from within, less so from without—overpower the more dramatic chronicle of Co-Op City. For the most part, however, he strikes a nice balance between the histories of a beloved place and a turbulent family.
A generally engrossing narrative of class and mobility in urban America.Pub Date: Aug. 19, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-115139-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2008
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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