The Gift Best Given: A Memoir (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781734757200)

"Like a jigsaw puzzle, every story is made up of pieces; big ones, smaller ones, pieces not easily found, tiny and hiding, essential to complete the picture."

At almost seventy years old, Edward Di Gangi had never given much thought to the fact he was adopted. However, a cemetery visit and a book about a favorite author's search for lost family suddenly compel him to embark on a genealogical quest to discover his origins. As he digs deeper, he begins to piece together the life story of an extraordinary woman--his birth mother.

Far from being the ordinary woman that Di Gangi had envisioned, Genevieve Knorowski was an aspiring "artista" who left home at the age of seventeen in the midst of World War II to join an ice-skating company in Vancouver. Journeying alone by train across the continent from New York, Genevieve would go on to achieve fame as an ice show performer, skating in the United States, Central and South America, and across Europe. However, it is a decision Genevieve makes on Easter Sunday in a church on New York City's Upper West Side that will forever connect the life of a young woman pursuing her dreams with the life of a seventy-year-old man searching for answers to the lifelong questions of who we are, where we come from, and what family means.