A heartwarming amalgam of personal fact, fiction, and history.
An affecting tale of an Italian immigrant’s struggle to make a life for himself in the United States.
After the unification of Italy brought with it a wave of economic distress, Michelangelo’s father traveled to America twice, looking for a way to support his family. Despite his success on his first trip, even more dire straits, and the urging of his wife prompted him to return a second time. He had a heart attack while overseas and never saw his family again. Protagonist Michelangelo inherited his father’s curiosity and wanderlust and longed to visit his grave, located in Connecticut. In 1909, he finally disembarks for the United States, and immediately learns what his father learned: that this land of opportunity can also be an unforgiving, dangerous place. Undaunted, he finds work in Pennsylvania at a steel mill and then a job on a building project in Ohio before finally setting off for Connecticut, where he has some family. There, he starts to lay down roots. He marries a woman he adores, has four daughters, and buys a home. He suffers a terrible accident while chopping wood, however, which results in the amputation of his arm and leaves him nearly unable to find work. Also, after nine years of marriage, his wife suddenly dies, leaving him without any help raising his children. The state threatens to take his children away if he proves unable to quickly find a means to care for them. In her first book, author Rizzo creates a seamless blend of fiction and nonfiction, largely based on conversations with her family and friends, creating a memoirlike novel. The abiding themes are Michelangelo’s virtuous indomitability and his transformation from Italian day laborer to Italian-American, or from Michelangelo to Mike. His allegiance to the U.S. comes through most clearly during World War II: “Mike was an American. He cried as many nights as he had prayed for his cousins and remnant family in Italy.” This is a touching, refreshing reminder of how much prosperity can spring from a generous spirit.
A heartwarming amalgam of personal fact, fiction, and history.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9966687-0-5
Page Count: 358
Publisher: Giro Di Mondo
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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