A brief yet intricate and fascinating account of not only a special place and time, but also a relative’s sad mental...
Poole’s memoir recounts time spent with a troubled family member in New York City.
Back in 1963, when the author was a teenager living in a small town in North Carolina, she wound up spending a summer in Brooklyn, New York. She was there to babysit for her cousin Jimmy and his wife Delores. In 1972, Delores threw her 23-month-old baby off the roof of an eight-story building and then jumped off herself. This information about Delores’ suicide, revealed at the beginning of the book, casts an eerie pallor over everything else that is to come. Twenty-four-year-old Delores was considered something of a free spirit in 1963; she would do things like go out to nightclubs even though she had a husband and children at home. Such activities could be deemed scandalous at the time, but this didn’t seem to bother Delores. In Poole’s fond recollections of trips with Delores and others to places like Coney Island and the Apollo theater, she describes Delores as the big sister she had never had. But the fun was not to last. Ten years later, the author returned to Brooklyn to find that things had changed: Delores’ relationship with Jimmy had disintegrated, and she was exhibiting bizarre behavior, talking about angels and demons in the world. As the author phrases it, “The Delores I had known was already gone.” The journey to this state takes some time; some portions of the narrative are not particularly eventful, such as when the author takes a boat ride on the Hudson. Still, readers learn much about the time period, from the fashion to the food to the things one encounters when one is 16 and “somewhat naïve but not clueless.” As a snapshot of an era and a personal account of a troubled woman’s tragic decline, the work is undeniably memorable.
A brief yet intricate and fascinating account of not only a special place and time, but also a relative’s sad mental breakdown.Pub Date: March 27, 2023
ISBN: 9781669871835
Page Count: 152
Publisher: XlibrisUS
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The stormy career of a top Navy SEAL hotspur. Commander Marcinko, USN Ret., recently served time at Petersburg Federal Prison for conspiracy to defraud the Navy by overcharging for specialized equipment—the result, he says, of telling off too many admirals. It seems that his ornery and joyous aggression, nurtured by a Czech grandfather in a flinty Pennsylvania mining town, has brought him to grief in peace and to brilliance in war. Serving his first tour in Vietnam in 1966 as an enlisted SEAL expert in underwater demolition, Marcinko returned for a second tour as an officer leading a commando squad he had trained. Here, his accounts of riverine warfare—creeping underwater to Vietcong boats and slipping over their gunwales; raiding VC island strongholds in the South China Sea; steaming up to the Cambodian border to tempt the VC across and being overrun- -are galvanic, detailed, and told with a true craftsman's love. What did he think of the Vietcong? ``The bastards—they were good.'' His battle philosophy? ``...kill my enemy before he has a chance to kill me....Never did I give Charlie an even break.'' After the aborted desert rescue of US hostages in the Tehran embassy, Marcinko was ordered to create SEAL Team Six—a counterterrorist unit with worldwide maritime responsibilities. In 1983, the unit was deployed to Beirut to test the security of the US embassy there. Easily evading the embassy security detail, sleeping Lebanese guards, and the Marines, the SEALs planted enough fake bombs to level the building. When Marcinko spoke to ``a senior American official'' about the problem, the SEAL's blunt security advice was rejected, particularly in respect to car-bomb attacks. Ninety days later, 63 people in the embassy compound were killed by a suicide bomber driving a TNT-filled truck. Profane and asking no quarter: the real nitty-gritty, bloody and authentic. (Eight-page photo insert—not seen.)
Pub Date: March 2, 1992
ISBN: 0-671-70390-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1992
Great fun.
The second installment of childhood recollections (after Opposite the Cross Keys, 1988) by mystery writer S.T. Haymon, who here evokes a sheltered 12-year-old's further encounters with life's earthier side.
Haymon's 1920's, upper-middle-class childhood revolved typically around school, home, loyal servants, and a pair of doting, well-educated parents—until age 12, when her father died and her mother decided to move to London. Refusing to accompany her, the precocious, comically self-confident Sylvia tried to limit this series of upheavals by insisting on remaining in Norfolk in the care of a favorite teacher—except that at the last minute her headmistress (already a sworn enemy) switched houses, arranging for two maiden schoolteachers to put Sylvia up in their house instead. Sylvia knew that the Misses Gosse and Locke were eccentric. What she didn't know was that the skinny, aggressive history teacher and the teary, puppy-like math professor were lesbians. Nor did she notice as Miss Locke's increasingly desperate infatuation with her began to lead the entire household toward destruction. Amusing characters abound—the gardener, Sylvia's only ally, whose faith in the value of a virgin's tips on the horse races led him to pay her for advice; the dour housekeeper who sang opera and downed bottles of gin; the art teacher's model who bewildered Sylvia with talk of "randy old dykes"; and the spiritual channel who informed her that her daddy was watching everything she did from heaven. Haymon's depiction of herself as an unusually clever, frequently petulant, and thoroughly practical young girl obsessed with filling her stomach while all sorts of passionate fireworks exploded around her evokes an era when secrets still existed and scandals were bursting to happen—and makes for slyly humorous, very British entertainment.
Great fun.Pub Date: Dec. 14, 1990
ISBN: 312-04986-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
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