A wider world

Bronx Primitive: Portraits in a Childhood was chosen as one of the twelve best books of the year by The New York Times in 1982. Now we have Kate Simon's honest, moving, and beautifully written sequel, A Wider World, about growing up in the Depression-ridden but vital New York of the 1930s. With a spirited sense of self-preservation and without a trace of sentimentality, the author explores the wondrous flowering and momentary terrors of her adolescence. In that bittersweet time, the boys never had enough money to take out the girls and the girls often had crushes on each other and their teachers. Sex was strange but fascinating, and eventually led Kate to set up housekeeping with a boy, to her father's horror and the envy of her friends. Birth control was haphazard and abortions were primitive. The need to learn about everything - life, literature, politics, love, the city - was urgent. Kate Simon has remembered it all with great clarity and wry humor. In her remembering, these events might have happened yesterday, were they not so utterly of a time and place. In the immediacy of the emotions that reverberate on every page this memoir is completely contemporary and timeless in its appeal.