A good-natured tale about a lost world that lies over the Brooklyn Bridge.
A candid, personal look at the geography of memory.
In this warmhearted memoir of a retiree’s tour of his old haunts, Junker tries to do for 1950s Brooklyn what James Joyce did for Dublin in Ulysses: rebuild a city, from memory. For readers looking for more accessible, albeit less remarkable, prose than Joyce’s, Junker’s tale is quite appealing, as he reconstructs Brooklyn in a specific place and time. The author spends a single winter day in Brooklyn walking the streets that defined his childhood, visiting the homes, churches and baseball fields where much of his story played out. Though not entirely idyllic–for example, the author’s German father suffers the indignities of discrimination after the war and dies relatively young–on the whole, the story will engage readers with animated recollections of a boisterous Italian neighborhood. Constructing the narrative around specific places like Coney Island, Kings Highway and Prospect Park, the author firmly ties each to the people in his life, remembering his rabble-rousing friends and ribald uncles with equal parts warmth and reserve. Junker reflects Brooklyn through the prism of his childhood, but he makes the archeology of the place vibrant and meaningful, even for readers who have never set foot in the New York borough. It’s the details that make it delicious, from recollections of the Brooklyn Dodgers that tap the country’s collective love of the underdog, to the sing-song cacophony of immigrant voices living the American dream. The author fittingly thanks Pete Hamill for inspiration–Junker infuses his childhood stomping grounds with the same affection with which Hamill writes about Manhattan.
A good-natured tale about a lost world that lies over the Brooklyn Bridge.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2005
ISBN: 0-595-36846-8
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.
In her first nonfiction book, novelist Grande (Dancing with Butterflies, 2009, etc.) delves into her family’s cycle of separation and reunification.
Raised in poverty so severe that spaghetti reminded her of the tapeworms endemic to children in her Mexican hometown, the author is her family’s only college graduate and writer, whose honors include an American Book Award and International Latino Book Award. Though she was too young to remember her father when he entered the United States illegally seeking money to improve life for his family, she idolized him from afar. However, she also blamed him for taking away her mother after he sent for her when the author was not yet 5 years old. Though she emulated her sister, she ultimately answered to herself, and both siblings constantly sought affirmation of their parents’ love, whether they were present or not. When one caused disappointment, the siblings focused their hopes on the other. These contradictions prove to be the narrator’s hallmarks, as she consistently displays a fierce willingness to ask tough questions, accept startling answers, and candidly render emotional and physical violence. Even as a girl, Grande understood the redemptive power of language to define—in the U.S., her name’s literal translation, “big queen,” led to ridicule from other children—and to complicate. In spelling class, when a teacher used the sentence “my mamá loves me” (mi mamá me ama), Grande decided to “rearrange the words so that they formed a question: ¿Me ama mi mamá? Does my mama love me?”
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6177-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
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