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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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