Framing a Life: A Family Memoir - Hardcover

Ferraro, Geraldine A.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 068485404X ISBN 13: 9780684854045

Publisher: Scribner, 1998

Synopsis

Written by the first woman nominated for Vice President of the United States, this heartwarming personal story of four Italian-American women looks back on the lives of the author's mother and grandmother and ahead at the future of her two daughters. 50,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

Geraldine A. Ferraro served as a U.S. representative from Queens, New York, before she was selected in 1984 to be Walter Mondale's vice presidential running mate. She appeared as the cocommentator with Pat Buchanan on CNN's Crossfire and in January 1998 announced her candidacy for the U.S. Senate. Her 1986 book, Ferraro: My Story, was a number one New York Times best-seller. She lives in New York and has three adult children and two grandchildren. She wrote this book with Catherine Whitney.

Reviews

Ferraro's grandmother immigrated to the U.S. in 1890, one of many poor southern Italians who had to learn to negotiate in a strange culture with a language they could neither understand nor speak. It's a story that makes her granddaughter's election to the House of Representatives and subsequent nomination as the first female candidate for the vice presidency all the more remarkable. With the able assistance of Whitney, Ferraro provides a moving and lively account of her grandmother's life in a New York City tenement with her husband and ten children. Ferraro's mother, Antonetta, married well, but the untimely death of her husband forced her to move from an affluent suburb to the South Bronx, where she worked as a beadmaker by day and a cook by night to send Ferraro and her brother to private schools. The author credits her own successes as a lawyer and elected official to her mother's hard work, sacrifice and love. Unfortunately, when Ferraro's narrative leaves her family to recount her experience as Walter Mondale's running mate, it deteriorates into a superficial political autobiography on a subject she covered better in Ferraro: My Story (1985). Ferraro presents herself as a wife and mother first, disingenuously describes her perfect family life and argues that questions about her husband's financial dealings were groundless and sparked by sexism and anti-Italian prejudice. It seems clear that Ferraro hoped this book would help position her in a November fight for Al D'Amato's Senate seat, but as Ferraro failed to win the Democratic primary and will not run, only the family history has much resonance.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

One autobiography is enough for most people, even successful politicians. Writing a second suggests a certain self-obsession, but this is not what comes through the prose of Ferraro's most recent effort (after Ferraro: My Story, not reviewed). She begins with the story of her realization that the unheralded efforts of her mother and grandmother were fundamental contributions to the achievements of their daughter and granddaughter. The early chapters of the book recount the harsh, difficult circumstances in which her immigrant grandmother came to this country, struggled to survive, and was caught between the expectations of an old world and the opportunities of a new world. Her first-generation mother became a bridge, a woman who could not herself realize the independence and potential of an American woman, but who could make the American dream a reality for her daughter. From this stock Ferraro emerged an educated, strong, and ambitious woman, who believed fate was something to be shaped rather than endured. Too much of the second half of the book focuses on Ferraro's political career, remaining in touch with the family/roots theme only occasionally, and one wishes that greater insight into her relationships with her own daughters, especially given the demands her career must have placed on her time and family life, would have been provided. Nevertheless, this is an interesting, undeniably moving account of a maternal lineage lovingly written by a woman self-consciously embracing her foremothers. The most enduring image is Ferraro's presentation of what it means for parents to make genuinely selfless sacrifices for their children. What we see in these pages is not only an expression of the will to endure hardships to benefit one's child, but also the foresight and humility to embrace a goal for that child which included living a different life than that of her parents. (Radio satellite tour) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Focusing on four generations of Italian American women.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In contrast to the author's late political candidacies (she lost her second attempt for the Senate last month), Ferraro's memoir should encounter a better reception from the public. The work has two halves, Ferraro's relationship with her mother and her campaign experiences. Her proximate inspiration for writing, which endows her prose with deeper, more genuine feelings than displayed by the typical politician's autobiography, was a self-deprecating remark made by her hospitalized mother in reply to a nurse's question: "I graduated from elementary school. Big deal, huh?" On daughter Geraldine, that comment forced the realization of her mother's sacrifices in raising two children, and so Ferraro embarked on the activity pursued by millions: genealogy. As is common with many descendants of immigrants, Ferraro's connection to the Old Country (southern Italy, in her case) had attenuated to vague memories of grandparents' stories. So she interviewed relatives, researched papers, and, with gratefully acknowledged assistance, wrote up this family history. Ferraro's mother made a successful match to escape from New York tenements, but tragedy cursed the happy match: one son died in childbirth, another in a car accident, and the father died suddenly when Ferraro was nine. What followed was her mother's struggle to ensure that her two surviving children received an education, an effort that fortified Geraldine's heartfelt devotion. That's the touching first and, altogether, better half of this memoir. The more routine second part recalls her early work as a Queens congresswoman and her bitter reaction to opposition-research, when she was Mondale's running mate, that dished dirt about her husband and father, dead for 40 years at that time. An affecting remembrance that steers clear of sentimentalism, Ferraro's memoir should pique the memories of readers' own immigrant roots. Gilbert Taylor

Edition details

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 068485404X
• ISBN 13: 9780684854045
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 224