Bronx Primitive: Portraits in a Childhood

by Kate Simon

Book Overview

"As an account of growing up female, it is a fit companion piece to Mary McCarthy's classic Memoirs of a Catholic Girlhood."--Le Anne Schreiber, The New York Times.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0140263314
• ISBN13: 9780140263312
• Release Date: August 1997
• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.63 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.1" x 7.7"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

well written memoir

This book is a warm, witty and intricate look at the author's childhood and teenage years in the Bronx. The prose sucks you in, and you are given enough detail so that you feel that you are right there with the author. However, if you want to give it as a gift to a young bookworm, be forewarned that it contains graphic sexual content, including a blow-by-blow description of the male and female anatomy, and several descriptions of sexual (and physical) abuse.

Jewish immigrant comes of age

Kate Simon's little book will doubtless become a classic of the genre: memoir, coming of age, the immigrant experience, sexual awakening, life on the stoops in the Bronx...Told unsentimentally and with a refreshingly straightforward style, Simon manages to convey both the sense and the essence of her unusual childhood to her readers.

An unintentionally poetic inspiring memoir

Good fortune was with me when I happened upon this book last year. It is now one of my all-time favorites and I went on to read the two books that chronologically follow this one. My only complaint is that Ms. Simon died before she had the chance to tell us every minute detail about her unextraordinary, extraordinary life. A Jewish immigrant household in the Bronx shaped Kate's wonderful and unique personality. She shares her childhood - engrossing tales of urban fairy tale embedded in the real world of poverty -with the aplomb of a grand story-teller. If only I could have met her. She is the baudy humorous glamorous grandmother we all wish was our own.