A Safe Place
The True Story of a Father, a Son, a Murder
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4.1 • 10 Ratings
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
"Dramatic, graphic and wrenching...The reader is left to wonder--at the devastation of Carcaterra's youth, at his survival to adulthood, and at the grace that allowed him to craft this piercing memoir."
THE WASHINGTON POST
Lorenza Carcaterra grew up in Hell's Kitchen, New York in the 1950s and '60s in a confusing world of love and fear of his paradoxically violent and affectionate father. Then Lorenzo learned that his father had murdered his first wife. And he wondered how he could love his father again. Did he possess the same murderous fury; would he someday suddenly lash out at those he loved? As his father's physical abuse escalated, Lorenzo sought frantically for a safe place...a place where he could find hope and reconciliation and peace, where his father's terrible shadow no longer lingered. Now, decades later, Lorenzo has finally come to terms with the awful truth about his father. A SAFE PLACE is the brilliant result.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this memoir, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra recalls growing up in Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen in the 1950s and 1960s, a crime-ridden area populated mostly by Irish and Italian immigrant families. He lived with his father Mario--ex-boxer, butcher and small-time con man--and Mario's second wife, the author's mother. Known in the neighborhood as a man with a hair-trigger temper, Mario beat his wife and his son mercilessly for years. On a trip to Italy, where the then 14-year-old author learned that his father had been imprisoned for killing his first wife, the small bit of love he felt for him turned to hate. After Mario's death in 1988, however, Carcaterra became nostalgic about the trips to Yankee Stadium and Madison Square Garden that they had enjoyed together, and he realized that he had loved his father. The book is psychologically harrowing, and readers will probably conclude that, despite having an articulate and forgiving son, Mario was a monster. 40,000 first printing.
