A set of remembrances that are often as engaging as they are heartfelt.
Retired accountant and businessman Skaleski’s debut memoir collects the author’s fond memories of growing up in mid-20th-century Illinois.
The author was born in 1942 in Chicago, and his Polish American family lived in Bucktown, a neighborhood of Eastern European refugees. Like most kids, the young author delighted in running wildly around the neighborhood, and that’s how he broke his left leg one Halloween—as the title of this collection’s opening story, “Look Both Ways,” teases. Other stories showcase other accidents, as when he later broke the very same leg. These recollections reflect the settings in which Skaleski grew up, in which were notably few luxuries. The story “Art,” for example, reveals that the author often built his own toys (including an SF-inspired “squadron” of unidentified flying objects), and in “Windows and Doors,” the Skaleskis, while staying with relatives in Wisconsin, use an outhouse with a rather startling substitute for toilet paper. There are familiar tidbits that readers of all ages will find relatable, about being raised in a Catholic home, looking after a first pet (in “Taking Care of Things”), and acquiring the impressive skill of secretly unwrapping and rewrapping Christmas gifts (in “Oil is Oil”). The author’s focus is on family, with tales of his protective older sister, an emergency involving his baby sibling (in the aptly titled “Responsibilities”), and his mother repeatedly, and apparently baselessly, accusing his father of infidelity. However, later tales shed light on the author’s careers, such as his high school job at a McDonald’s owned by Ray Kroc, who famously turned the restaurant franchise into a household name.
The author delivers these stories chronologically, although most of them aren’t set on the titular Charleston Street in Chicago; his family lived in other apartments and even in another city in Illinois (specifically, Des Plaines). His prose is simple and good-natured in tone, and he endearingly writes about many of his friends and family members; he also offers his amusing interactions with God, to whom he spoke more often than prayed. Stories involving romantic interests spark memorable anecdotes, such as two that chronicle separate kissing sessions that were thwarted by unwanted interruptions. Of course, some of the stories here are more serious and profound, as when Skaleski tells of losing a girlfriend to an unexpected illness; another tale spotlights the author’s life at the time that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Other stories touch on racism and other bigotries, as when schoolmates derided his Polish heritage. Much of this collection emanates an unmistakable sense of nostalgia, as when the young author passes by a VistaVision movie theater, becomes enamored with Annette Funicello (then a member of the Mickey Mouse Club), or works a job for an astonishing 60 cents an hour. The final few stories disappointingly feel as if the author is sprinting to the end, as he entirely skips decades of his life and mentions “failed marriages” only in passing.
A set of remembrances that are often as engaging as they are heartfelt.Pub Date: March 31, 2024
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The stormy career of a top Navy SEAL hotspur. Commander Marcinko, USN Ret., recently served time at Petersburg Federal Prison for conspiracy to defraud the Navy by overcharging for specialized equipment—the result, he says, of telling off too many admirals. It seems that his ornery and joyous aggression, nurtured by a Czech grandfather in a flinty Pennsylvania mining town, has brought him to grief in peace and to brilliance in war. Serving his first tour in Vietnam in 1966 as an enlisted SEAL expert in underwater demolition, Marcinko returned for a second tour as an officer leading a commando squad he had trained. Here, his accounts of riverine warfare—creeping underwater to Vietcong boats and slipping over their gunwales; raiding VC island strongholds in the South China Sea; steaming up to the Cambodian border to tempt the VC across and being overrun- -are galvanic, detailed, and told with a true craftsman's love. What did he think of the Vietcong? ``The bastards—they were good.'' His battle philosophy? ``...kill my enemy before he has a chance to kill me....Never did I give Charlie an even break.'' After the aborted desert rescue of US hostages in the Tehran embassy, Marcinko was ordered to create SEAL Team Six—a counterterrorist unit with worldwide maritime responsibilities. In 1983, the unit was deployed to Beirut to test the security of the US embassy there. Easily evading the embassy security detail, sleeping Lebanese guards, and the Marines, the SEALs planted enough fake bombs to level the building. When Marcinko spoke to ``a senior American official'' about the problem, the SEAL's blunt security advice was rejected, particularly in respect to car-bomb attacks. Ninety days later, 63 people in the embassy compound were killed by a suicide bomber driving a TNT-filled truck. Profane and asking no quarter: the real nitty-gritty, bloody and authentic. (Eight-page photo insert—not seen.)
Pub Date: March 2, 1992
ISBN: 0-671-70390-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1992
Great fun.
The second installment of childhood recollections (after Opposite the Cross Keys, 1988) by mystery writer S.T. Haymon, who here evokes a sheltered 12-year-old's further encounters with life's earthier side.
Haymon's 1920's, upper-middle-class childhood revolved typically around school, home, loyal servants, and a pair of doting, well-educated parents—until age 12, when her father died and her mother decided to move to London. Refusing to accompany her, the precocious, comically self-confident Sylvia tried to limit this series of upheavals by insisting on remaining in Norfolk in the care of a favorite teacher—except that at the last minute her headmistress (already a sworn enemy) switched houses, arranging for two maiden schoolteachers to put Sylvia up in their house instead. Sylvia knew that the Misses Gosse and Locke were eccentric. What she didn't know was that the skinny, aggressive history teacher and the teary, puppy-like math professor were lesbians. Nor did she notice as Miss Locke's increasingly desperate infatuation with her began to lead the entire household toward destruction. Amusing characters abound—the gardener, Sylvia's only ally, whose faith in the value of a virgin's tips on the horse races led him to pay her for advice; the dour housekeeper who sang opera and downed bottles of gin; the art teacher's model who bewildered Sylvia with talk of "randy old dykes"; and the spiritual channel who informed her that her daddy was watching everything she did from heaven. Haymon's depiction of herself as an unusually clever, frequently petulant, and thoroughly practical young girl obsessed with filling her stomach while all sorts of passionate fireworks exploded around her evokes an era when secrets still existed and scandals were bursting to happen—and makes for slyly humorous, very British entertainment.
Great fun.Pub Date: Dec. 14, 1990
ISBN: 312-04986-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
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