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
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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