A rare and refreshing tribute to a happy and wonderfully exuberant family.
Italian-American Cascone (Mother’s Little Helper, 1986, etc.) pays affectionate tribute to her heritage as she recalls growing up among relatives determined to live life con brio.
In chapters that chronicle the various highlights of her youth, the author begins by recalling how her father adjusted to her being a girl. Though this successful lawyer had expected his firstborn to be a son, he soon decided that even a daughter should not grow up to be one of those “silly ladies.” He taught Cascone to stand up for herself, fight back when attacked, and never to back down. When the boys no longer allowed her to join their baseball games, her father taught her pool. Soon, to his delight, she was not only beating the local adolescent males but her father’s friends too. When a neighbor complained that Gina was playing pool for money, her mother initially forbid her to “hustle,” but upon learning that she was actually beating the men encouraged her to “clean them out.” Cascone recalls her reluctant move from their friendly city neighborhood to a big, new house in the less welcoming suburbs. Daddy sent her to a WASP prep school; her classmates ignored her until they saw her family at a school play and rumors began to circulate that they belonged to the Mafia. Cascone, deciding she might as well be a mob princess, played the role to the hilt. She recalls other memorable episodes: the Christmas her father resolved to have eels for dinner and stored them, alive, in the bathtub; their sentimental visit to Italy, where every meal seemed a celebration; her first encounter with the WASP Prince Charming she eventually married, though never sure whether it was her or the food that kept him coming back.
A rare and refreshing tribute to a happy and wonderfully exuberant family.Pub Date: July 22, 2003
ISBN: 0-7434-5328-X
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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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