BOOKS
SONNY BOY
AUTHOR AL PACINO
JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT YOU WERE OUT…
★★★★
“WRITING THIS BOOK, I’m finding out a little more about myself,” Al Pacino notes towards the end of Sonny Boy. “Objectively, I never knew what the fuck I was doing.”
For the reader, too, we find out rather a lot more about him. It’s fascinating to see one of the greatest screen actors of all time wrestle humbly and unselfconsciously with his own past, and attempt to square his extraordinary career with his very ordinary beginnings.
Reading the account of his early life as a second-generation Italian-American in the South Bronx, you can almost hear the Godfather theme tune playing. His story is much like the Corleone story —almost literally, given his grandfather came from a Sicilian town called Corleone. He began life stuck in “the mud of poverty”, sharing a tenement with his grandparents, his mother dying young, his father out of the picture.