A lightweight, haphazardly written memoir by a man who practiced the tonsorial arts in Manhattan barbershops for 55 years. From the town of Licodea Eubea (he provides a detailed history of the town, back to the Romans), Spagnuolo's parents made the first of many trips to America in 1913, when he was two years old. He took his first job while still a teenager at a shop in Manhattan's Bowery, earning $6 a week. He switched shops dozens of times—in between return trips to his farm and family in Sicily- -from 1928 to 1935, when he fled impending war in Europe. The author opened his own shop on Fifth Avenue in 1938; he and his partner would move once before buying the Arcade Barber Shop for $6,000 in 1945. (He notes other trips to Sicily during these years, interspersed, for some reason, with lengthy recollections of his favorite beagles.) Located in a lobby of the building that also housed the New Yorker magazine, the Arcade is the scene of many of his anecdotes—which he serves up with plenty of relish. The shop was patronized by Brendan Gill, S.N. Behrman, Johnny Carson, Henrik van Loon, and, once, Winston Churchill. One of the ``secrets'' he shares is his use of letters of introduction to newcomers in local office and apartment buildings. He also shares his ``Golden Rules for Serving the Public'' and his 10-step scalp treatment, his facial massage and razor stropping techniques, and the proper method for administering a hot olive oil shampoo. Spagnuolo sold his interest in the Arcade in 1976, but later returned to it, cutting hair professionally until he was 71, retiring in 1982. An odd, uncomfortable mix of barbershop chitchat with social, family, and personal history.
Pub Date: April 27, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-11872-4
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1995
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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