by Raffaela Marie Rizzo ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 22, 2015
A heartwarming amalgam of personal fact, fiction, and history.
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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
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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