Review: Thank Goliath by Domenic Aversa

A memoir spanning the author’s childhood to his later years, Thank Goliath by Domenic Aversa is both fun and tragic, emotional and entertaining. With cutting intelligence and the wisdom acquired with age, Aversa sews his memories together and offers readers the portrait of a bright, sensitive, and resilient man.

Adversity has repeatedly shown itself in Aversa’s life like a giant, which made him feel as little and unprepared as a child, but he has learned through these trials to face hardship. As in the story of David and Goliath, he has dealt with issues that seemed much larger than himself, but with strength and a willingness to fight, which he ultimately realized he got from his mother, with whom he had a tumultuous relationship. They learned the power of forgiveness and love from each other, and gathered invaluable lessons from their own adversity.

Aversa was born in Windsor, Canada to two Italian immigrants. Growing up in an overcrowded house under strained economic circumstances, he soon became restless. His mother succumbed to her community’s outdated notions of discipline and beat him to change his ways, and Aversa soon found himself stuck in a cycle of punishment and rebellion that would leave long-lasting marks on his life.

From his youth as a bit of a hooligan to his varied and successful career as a businessman, Aversa proved himself to be a steadfast and centered man – smart, ambitious, and resourceful. Moving around from Canada to Russia, the United States to Italy, his life was full of surprises and adventures, imbued by a strong will to appreciate life, no matter the difficulty of his upbringing. Despite the traumas that scarred his childhood, Aversa managed to make a good way in the world; he was always looking for ways to help people, whether his own family or strangers in a precarious business predicament. His mother’s several bouts of illness over the years cement in Aversa the feeling of responsibility to fix things, to help out, and to always find a way to salvation.

With age Aversa learned to look at his past with new eyes, managing to improve his complex relationship with his mother, and initiate a long, difficult path of self-healing – a process outlined in this canny memoir, acting as a work as self-help, as well as a portrait of a resilient man. While not overloaded with self-help jargon, Aversa instead takes an approach of leading by example, which can be more effective than a book that relies on sales-heavy language. That said, the book is a memoir at its core, written with impeccable free-flowing prose, and especially brilliant in dialogue, reading at times like a novel.

Thanks to the memoir’s chronological structure and colloquial narration, each relationship unfolds naturally without the author forcing a lesson or moral into an anecdote, and instead letting the scene speak for itself. Aversa crafts just the right balance of external and internal narration, even through the most intricate and painful details of his mother’s illness, or during the harsh recovery from his own physical and mental issues – an admirable honesty that makes the memoir all the more compelling.

Looking at adversity as a teacher rather than a foe, Thank Goliath is the personal yet universal tale of a man who has gone through life with his head held high and his heart ready to give, resulting in a distinctly inspiring and engrossing read.