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Cargando... The Autumn Balloonpor Kenny Porpora
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Inscríbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará. Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro. I love memoirs and Kenny Porpora reminds me why. Far from just a collection of Porpora's most intimate experiences in life, Porpora's words are if they were pulled from a diary from those very days unwashed by adult eyes recounting his childhood. From his progressive understanding of addiction to the custody battles between his mother and aging father it's a true coming of age story about an amazingly resilient young man. Thank you Kenny Porpora for sharing your story with the world. Writing his second work will be hard to top this haunting memoir that is far from a "dear diary" in tone and structure. It's not an easy read at times but one that you need to read to understand the situations of abuse and addiction. Because the prologue tells you of the present, you know Kenny does prevail, otherwise I would have read this with a feeling of impending dread rather than seeing how one overcomes a rough start in life. I received a copy for review through Goodreads First Reads. sin reseñas | añadir una reseña
"Every autumn, Kenny Porpora would watch his heartbroken mother scribble messages on balloons and release them into the sky above Long Island, one for each family member they'd lost to addiction. As the number of balloons grew, his mother fell deeper into alcoholism, drinking away her sorrows every night in front of the television, where her love of Regis Philbin provided a respite from the sadness around her. When their house was foreclosed upon, Kenny's mother absconded with him and his beloved dog and fled for the Arizona desert, joining her heroin-addicted brother on a quixotic search for a better life. What followed was an outlaw adolescence spent in constant upheaval surrounded by bizarre characters and drug-addicted souls. In the wake of unspeakable loss, Kenny convinced a college to take a chance on him, and turned to the mentors, writers, and poets he found to rebuild the family he lost, and eventually graduated from the Ivy League with a new life. Porpora's memoir is the story of a deeply dysfunctional but loving family, and follows his life from the chaos of his youth to his triumphs in the Ivy League. At times darkly comic, at times elegiac, The Autumn Balloon is a beautifully written testament to the irreplaceable bonds of family, even under the most trying circumstances, and one that marks the debut of an exciting new writer"-- No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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Google Books — Cargando... GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)305.242Social sciences Social Sciences; Sociology and anthropology Groups of people Age groups Early adulthoodClasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio:
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Porpura’s memoir The Autumn Balloon tells exactly what the boys went through all those years they were being bounced between their mother’s New Mexico apartments and cheap motels (when they weren’t living in her car) and whatever place their father could afford to house them in New York. The chances that Kenny and his brother would beat the odds against them and emerge from their childhoods intact - much less make something of themselves – were slim. But they did it.
The “balloon” in the book’s title refers to Kenny’s mother’s habit of once-a-year ceremoniously releasing balloons marked with the names of relatives killed by their addictions into the air while she cried and her children looked on. Over the years, as the number of balloons grew, the scene became more and more representative of the odds against Kenny and his brother surviving the family curse.
Kenny, in particular, beat the odds. Always a good enough student despite being yanked from school to school so many times, Kenny would eventually turn a GED qualification into acceptance into the prestigious Columbia Journalism School. Even as a kid, he knew he wanted to be a writer, and he showed enough talent and eagerness to succeed that his teachers noticed him. And now he is a writer with one book under his belt and a bright future ahead of him.
The Autumn Balloon sad as it is, and filled with the stories of so many wasted lives, is also filled with equal measures of hopefulness. It recounts the true story of a boy who, by his own determination to do so, saved himself from the life he seemed destined to live. May The Autumn Balloon inspire others to do the same. ( )