A spirited evocation of a complex immigrant culture, willing to show the scars its characters bear.
Three generations of an Italian-American family strive to assimilate in a lovingly imagined collection of linked stories.
Romano (When the World Was Young, 2007) focuses on the Comingo family, which arrives in Chicago shortly after World War II. Underachieving patriarch Fabio manages a barbershop with a dearth of customers. Headstrong mother Lucia offers heaping helpings of both food and no-nonsense wisdom, including the axiom that provides the book’s title. Son Giacomo is eager to escape his heritage; older brother Michelino proudly embraces it. Each family member speaks in the first person, a decision that could have produced clichéd, stereotypical prose. A pair of stories told in Lucia’s pidgin English do shade too far in that direction (“I no understand America. Is crazy”). But the author’s depth of feeling for his characters, combined with his ability to follow their subtle transformations through the decades, is affecting. The best-drawn character is Giacomo, or Jim (Americanization of names is a running theme). We follow him from after-school jobs to revelations about his mother to adulthood as a father and counselor—a job that, ironically, doesn’t let him escape his feelings of being smothered by Mom. At the center of the book are a series of bittersweet stories set during Lucia and Fabio’s courtship in Italy, revealing that their union was clumsy and, to an extent, unwanted. The climactic ending, in which multiple voices weave together, feels earned instead of mawkish. By the book’s close Romano has offered a wealth of details about jobs, heartbreak, religion and the business of making it in America. Though he doesn’t get into as much nitty-gritty about the Windy City as one of his obvious inspirations, Stuart Dybek’s The Coast of Chicago (1990), he effectively evokes the city’s ethnic life and the culture clashes it produces, both at the dinner table and out in the neighborhoods.
A spirited evocation of a complex immigrant culture, willing to show the scars its characters bear.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-085794-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
