Movie, Mystery, Medium

R.J. Cardullo's Movie, Mystery, Medium: A Memoir details the author's Italian-American beginnings in the New York of the 1950s and the profound effect that his extended, working-class family, as well as the borough of Brooklyn, has had on his life. So great has this effect been that, as the author ages, he finds he thinks less of the momentous history through which he has lived, or of the intellectual life he has enjoyed, than of some things far more permanent, primordial, and profound: the people and places he knew as a boy, and that knew him; the baseball he played and the movies he loved; the Mafiosi he met and marked; the religion of his youth that he abandoned, yet that did not abandon him. Cardullo knows he can't go home again: all he can really do is think about it, which he does so eloquently in Movie, Mystery, Medium: A Memoir.