Ambidextrous: The Secret Lives of Children - Hardcover

Picano, Felice

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0914017063 ISBN 13: 9780914017066

Publisher: Gay Pr of New York, 1985

Synopsis

Picano's bold, funny and outrageously honest memoir of suburban 1950s childhood forever altered how we remember childhod and how we think of it today. So scandalous at the time that the book's first shipment to Great Britain was seized and burned on the London docks, AMBIDEXTROUS has since become a much-prized classic, and is now re-released as Volume One in this completely repackaged series of Picano's classic complete memoirs.

About this title

Reviews

This fictionalized memoir recounts the adventures of an Italian-American schoolboy as he undergoes the trial of maturity in an upper-middle-class New York City suburb. One teacher hates him because he is left-handed, while another admires his ambition to become a writer and a truthful adult. In a first-person narrative, the hero describes his initiation into the rites of never-quite-innocent and sometimes harmful sex with the precocious Flaherty sisters and his school pal Ricky Hersch; later, there is his love affair with beautiful Franny Solomon whose crippled father is a voyeur. Bearing many resemblances to Doctorow's World's Fair, this novel re-creates a decadethe post-war yearsby limning the attitudes and desires of a young boy growing up and by an itemization of the toys he played with, the books he read, the friends he made and the games he played. But Picano's (The Lure hero is sometimes more sententious than Edgar Altschuler, and the narrative does not really engage one's interest until close to its end. February 22
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Gay Pr of New York
• Publication date: 1985
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0914017063
• ISBN 13: 9780914017066
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 200