A Safe Place

January 4, 1993
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.