An Unconventional Life: Memoirs of Carmen "Tom" Cellucci

These autobiographical memoirs are an easy, pleasant walk through the life of a cheerful, successful, adventurous man: Carmen—his first name a spelling error of "Carmine," the name of his immigrant Italian grandfather—or Tom, his renaming in the technical engineering world of huge generators, and later in the manufacturing world of foam plastics. For his book, Carmen selected life stories from a wide variety of locations. The reader gets a look at Carmen's working-class neighborhood in West Philadelphia, his long residences as an international sales executive for Westinghouse in India, then in South and Central America where he not only continued his work for Westinghouse but began and developed successfully, with a friend, Charles, the plastics factory in Panama, that employed many local workers. Late in life, he actually bought and worked a cattle farm in the hills of Panama.
Everywhere, Carmen's good nature, curiosity, and craving for unusual experience led him into situations and acquaintances that make up the bulk of the stories in this book. Climbing up the tail of a work elephant in India to avoid discovery by a tiger that was the point of a nature expedition he was part of; being solicited by the CIA to ferret out information that had bearing on another country's nuclear aspirations; or sailing through a storm to Cuba (he was an accomplished sailor, as well as a hands-on renewer of sail boats) –all the stories he tells here are told with good-humor, mirth, and a feeling for the surprises and wry occasions of life.
As a narrator, Carmen-Tom is focused on the events themselves and their surprising and humorous twists. There is no bragging, no narcissism; on the contrary, Carmen's voice is that of a friendly, often funny neighbor who had a lot of luck in his life and an urge to celebrate it with others. "An Unconventional Life" is his means of doing so. –Lacellu, Brazil