An original, if unapologetically lengthy, memoir of an American’s Italian life.
A memoir of an American-born woman’s long relationship with a small town in Tuscany.
Although debut author Fix was born in Chicago, she moved with her family to a street called Borgo in tiny Cetona, Italy, at a young age. The author learned Italian, went to school, and experienced the many joys and hardships of growing up on what, for her, was foreign soil. However, when she later attended Yale University, she felt alienated from her fellow American students. She had no shared experiences with them, and she found complex course work in the English language to be oddly challenging. She later returned to Cetona many times to visit, but she would build her professional and personal life in the United States. After decades of living in America, she decided to come back and spend a full year in Cetona. The book chronicles her time back in Italy and mixes it with memories of her past. As she visits with old friends, she’s reminded of what makes a small town great (everyone knows everyone) and awful (everyone gossips about everyone: “Even when you do things with the best intentions, here someone will find fault”). Fix writes lovingly of the many characters that make up this “lost town in the hills”; one person is described as possessing “gentle brown eyes” and another as a “great-looking woman.” But although such descriptions are heartfelt, readers may sometimes find it difficult to differentiate between the many figures that she encountered during her stay. They also add to a hefty page count. Still, Fix’s focus on the small town of Cetona is inarguably unusual, and her remembrance is full of illuminating details, particularly when comparing cultures. For example, of New York City’s Little Italy, she writes: “They spoke dialects I couldn’t understand and thought Italian food something it isn’t.” The end result is a touching personal tale that’s full of nostalgia yet strikingly honest.
An original, if unapologetically lengthy, memoir of an American’s Italian life.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 702
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2018
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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