Lively and lovely. Making these available to the English-speaking world is a great public service.
The gentle, intelligent voice of Galileo’s daughter speaks across the centuries in 124 remarkable epistles—published for the first time in English—written to her father in the early 17th century.
In 1613, when daughters Virginia and Livia were 13 and 12, respectively, Galileo placed them in Florence’s Convent of San Matteo, operated by the religious order called the Poor Clares. (Both Editor Sobel [Galileo’s Daughter, 1999, etc.] and the publisher are donating all proceeds from this book to the Poor Clares of New Mexico.) When the girls turned 16, they both took vows and new names. Virginia became Suor Maria Celeste; Livia, Suor Arcangela. In one of the fortuitous coincidences of history, the later letters in this collection come from the period when Galileo appeared before the Inquisition and was forced to deny the validity of the Copernican system. Maria Celeste’s fear for her father’s safety permeates virtually every line of these letters, even when she is writing about such mundane affairs as the health of a mule or the condition of her teeth. (“Recently I pulled a very large molar, which had rotted and was giving me great pain.”) Maria Celeste displays enormous veneration for Galileo. She addresses him as “Most Illustrious Lord Father” and throughout employs the most respectful tone and diction that Italian will allow. (The English translations are accompanied by the original-language versions on facing pages.) Occasionally she chides him very gently for not visiting often enough, for failing to write often enough, or for neglecting his health. She warns him about the presence of the plague in Florence, sending “a marvelous defense,” a concoction consisting of figs, nuts, rue, salt, and honey. Like any other child away from home, she asks for money, sympathy, care packages, and respect.
Lively and lovely. Making these available to the English-speaking world is a great public service.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2001
ISBN: 0-8027-1387-4
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2001
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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