Artful and honest, with a voice so genuine it transports.
Actor Romeo’s piquant memoir of growing up as an Italian-American boy in pre- and postwar Cleveland, Ohio—a time, place and culture that threw him many ups and downs.
Romeo’s memoir is a warm one—not because of the circumstances, but because that’s the type of man he’s become. He didn’t suffer many undo tribulations—having a much-loved uncle die at war was hardly a blessing, of course—and that allows an easy charm to escape these pages in the everydayness of it all. It’s not surprising that he’s comfortable with words; he’s an actor, after all. The little things he remembers can be like sparks that ignite the reader’s memory tinderbox —like, darn it, having to go ask the neighbors to move their car, again, the same neighbor who would come at Romeo’s father with a gun one drunken night. OK, maybe they’re not all little things. As in many houses, life revolved around the kitchen table, with its enchantments and rituals. The table featured Romeo’s father, an impatient man with anger management issues: “Pop could backhand me in a split second, his arm striking out so quickly—it seemed to work on some mysterious quick-spring mechanism—that I could never see it coming.” The food was solace, and his mother was there to serve it like a balm. Yet the “real lesson I had learned was more fear of my father,” he says. “And that led to our conflicted, tug-of-war relationship”—a relationship that can be painful to read about. There are other scenes, though, that will stick with readers: his learning about sex, the lives of his grandparents, his finding out that there are people called Jehovah’s Witnesses, etc. Cleveland suffered through an erratic economy, WWII turned lives on their heads, and school became Romeo’s sanctuary. Still, home supplied the most indelible incidents, as when Father Gallagher asked Romeo’s dad if he practiced birth control: “The church allows only one method of birth control, Mr. Romeo, the rhythm method….Do you know what that is?” “Of course,” his father shot back. “I’m a musician….Don’t worry! I keep the beat!”
Artful and honest, with a voice so genuine it transports.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-1462002207
Page Count: 236
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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