Customer Reviews

Too Close to the Falls

5 star:		(32)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I don't read much non-fiction, but I received this book as a gift and thoroughly enjoyed it. The author describes her unconvential childhood growing up near Niagara Falls, NY. Today, Gildiner would probably be diagnosed with attention deficit disorder, but back then, she was put to work in her father's drugstore at age four to burn off some of her "excess eneregy"--her doctor's orders! As Gildiner describes her experiences from pre-school through her teen years, she talks in the voice of the child she was then rather than the adult she is now. Her style is extremely effective in transporting the reader into her past life, a life that seems to have been both bewildering and magnificent at the same time. There is something for everyone here: television, racial conflicts, religious questioning, teen sexuality, Hollywood, and much more in this unique view of the "Leave it to Beaver" era.

One of the very best memoirs I have ever read and I specialize in girlhood memoirs. Born in the same year as the author, I very much enjoyed her recollections of how it was to grow up female in the early fifties. However the writer's childhood was undoubtedly more eccentric and adventurous than mine and probably most of our contemporaries. Her recounting of the wonderful and unique characters she encountered and how they shaped her perceptions of life is both hilarious and deeply affecting. I am truly grateful that she has brought them into my life to entertain and educate me as well. This book ends as she begins her teen years. Should she write a sequel, and I fervently hope she will, I will be first in line to buy it. This book is quite simply a remarkable reading experience!

This book was an absolute delight to read. It has the innocence and laugh-out-loud humor of a child's perpective.

From the intelligently quirky mother to Warty, the self-appointed caretaker of the city dump, all of the characters ring true. And after just a few sentences Gildiner has you feeling like you really know them.

And then there's the main character, the author as a child, who basically grew up in her father's drug store. It's a miracle she lived long enough, given her adventures and attitude, to write the book. Lucky for us she did.

Each chapter is a short-story unto itself, a la Jean Shepherd. And there just aren't enough of them. After 350 pages you're left feeling cheated because there aren't 350 more.

Read this book.

The author's engaging style and an endearing cast of characters make this one of the best memoirs I've read in a long time. Her family's eccentricities (eating every meal at restaurants, seven days a week) had me laughing aloud at times, while tales of ordinary people struggling with their human frailties make the story especially poignant. The author is skilled in building the reader's sense of righteous indignation over various injustices that occur along the way, often in connection with her religious education. I was so caught up in the book that I recommended it to several friends. Unfortunately, the story line took a nosedive toward the end. The author's reminiscences about the romantic entanglements of a young priest assigned to teach her religion class just don't ring true to me. Perhaps I'm not in the best position to judge this, as I'm not Catholic and did not attend Catholic school, but the idea of a young priest taking a 15-year-old girl on a romantic dinner date and plying her with wine till she gets drunk seems pretty far-fetched to me, especially in that day and age. As the scene played on, I kept expecting to find that it was a dream or daytime reverie, and that the the author would return us eventually to the real world. Even if the story is true, the tone she sets in the previous chapters doesn't prepare the reader for this turn of events. The promise of the book's beginning falls flat, and the ending comes so abruptly that it seems as if she just couldn't figure out any other way to finish up. Nonetheless, she is an extraordinarily talented writer with enchanting stories to tell, embellished or not, and I hope to see new works from her in the future.

Catherine Gildiner, a clinical psychologist and advice columnist, has written a fascinating memoir about her years growing up in Lewiston NY in the 50s. As a hyperactive and precocious child of four, she was put to work in her father's pharmacy under "doctor's orders." Her unconventional upbringing by older, free-thinking parents, who gave her a lot of leeway to think for herself and take responsibility for her actions, contrasted sharply with her stringent Catholic school education. Gildiner deftly uses her psychology training to show how young Cathy perceived herself and others, and how she struggled to peel through the layers of social and religious convention to see small-town Lewiston as it really was.

The author does an excellent job of painting portraits of the people that influenced her life. These include her mother, a very atypical 50s housewife who never cooked or kept house, her hard working civic-minded father, and Roy, the black pharmacy deliveryman who took Cathy on his rounds. Through her prescription deliveries, Cathy met Warty, a disfigured outcast who worked at the garbage dump, Mad Bear, the chief of the Tuscarora Indian tribe, and Marie, a retired prostitute/abortionist. Cathy bumped heads with an assortment of classmates, nuns, and priests at school and church.

This is a wonderful coming of age story that is poignant and thought-provoking. There were many humorous touches as Cathy described the world through an innocent child's eyes. There was also a dark side to this memoir as she puzzled over the disturbing and often contradictory elements of society that were often kept under wraps during that era. Having grown up in western New York in the 50s, I recognized many of the details of Cathy's childhood, such as beef on weck, early TV programming with its frequent test patterns, the use of fluoroscopes in shoe stores, and the severe lake effect snow storms in the area. This book makes an excellent selection for a discussion group, and the paperback edition includes a reader's guide for that very purpose.

Eileen Rieback

The first 250 pages of this book cover Catherine Gildiner's unusual childhood. It was pleasing to read a memoire with really nice parents, even if their childraising strategies were bizarre.

But when I got to the parts about Catherine's life age 10 and after, the charming, funny, strange, scenic stories and well-realized characters were replaced with essayistic writing concentrating on her Catholic faith or lack thereof and descriptions of what seemed to me cliched Catholic nuns and priests. I lost interest, but read to the end.

I wish there had been some kind of conclusion drawn, or a wrap up of how her life developed after the last episode, but no such luck. I felt let down.

Oh, well, I was entertained for the better part of a week. What more can you want?

I was there during the '50's, although I did not know the author, I did know the characters and places she describes so well. How in the world she remembers her reactions so clearly--as a concrete-thinking child her conclusions are so funny to us as adults--yet we remember making similar absurd conclusions as children, and accepting them. Both versions available from amazon, I prefer the version with the authentic names and locations. I would give anything for another book of hers--it is her memory and writing, not the events, that are so endearing.

There may be something to the idea that interesting geography creates interesting lives. Young Catherine Gildiner certainly "hit the ground running" in her nascent life. A photograph preceding one of the chapters shows a precocious, Shirley Temple-ish girl in a cowboy outfit, a girl who was consuming life voraciously from the start.

The setting is the early 1950's in Lewiston, New York, near the Niagara escarpment. The upheavals of the 60's are yet to come, but Cathy's fearlessness draws her toward the spirit of change that is beginning to coalesce. Her best friend is a black deliveryman, Roy, who treats her as an equal as they drive about, dispensing pharmacy drugs from her father's business. Cathy glimpses both the upper crust of Lewiston and the outcasts: the drunken misery of the Indians in the area, and a local parallel to the "Hunchback of Notre Dame" named Warty. She meets the local abortionist, and delivers drugs to Marilyn Monroe--in town for the filming of the movie "Niagara". This book has it all. There is peril, courage, friendship, social consciousness... but overriding everything is a tremendous sense of nostalgia. There is so much vividness to Gildiner's memoir that you feel as if you lived it yourself, reading it. It would make a great movie, if Hollywood still made wholesome human-interest stories. Read this book, and for a short while, you'll be transported to a different time and place, to live and breathe it as young Catherine Gildiner did.

I grew up in Lewiston 20 years after Ms. Gildiner (in the same neighborhood, I believe) and really enjoyed her book. She did a great job at capturing the essence of the place... small town charm filled with careless (dangerous) adventures in the gorge and river plus an assortment of oddball characters. I make it a point to visit at least once a year. The only problem I had was that she seemed to stretch her facts a bit at times. Catherine, did you really ride your sled from the power project cliffs to the Riverside Inn? I need some clarification on that one.

Shades of Russell Baker's Growing Up--thank goodness for writers like Dr. Gildiner who with such enormous talent bring us back to relive the joys, tears, injustices, delights of childhood--her writing brought me closer to my kids as she refreshed my understanding of how people learn about life and love--I'm waiting for volume II please.