An impossible-to-put-down page-turner revealing the Mafia makeup and three courageous women who bore witness to save others.
The highly compelling story of the women who dared to break omertà, the Mafia code of silence.
In fully developing his subjects, Perry (The Rift: A New Africa Breaks Free, 2015, etc.) shows remarkable empathy for their plights. The women were raised in Calabria, the home to the ’Ndrangheta, an arm of the Mafia, just like the Camorra of Naples and the Cosa Nostra of Sicily. Italy cracked down on the Sicilian Mafia in the early 1980s, outlawing any relationship, even familial. By the mid-2000s, Cosa Nostra was a shadow of itself. Then the ’Ndrangheta stepped in, took over the narcotics trade, and expanded it to a multibillion-euro business. In 2009, a prosecutor named Alessandra Cerreti was assigned to Calabria, and her tireless work uncovered the truth. In this captivating true-crime narrative, the author paints a frightening and intimate picture of women’s misery under the rule of organized crime. Many were denied education, they knew their sons would end up murderers, and their daughters married early and were routinely abused. They were part of the clan, and voluntarily or not, women worked as messengers, bookkeepers, and heads of the business when their husbands were “unavailable.” In the mid-1990s, ’Ndrangheta wife Lea Garofalo left her husband, taking her daughter to inform against the Mafia. She spent years in the witness protection program; unfortunately, her witness produced no arrests. Garofalo and her daughter hid for years, knowing her husband was following them. She eventually attempted reconciliation, knowing full well she would likely be murdered. Fortunately, she was not the only woman who was fed up with the misogynist tyranny and oppression of the “family.” Giuseppina Pesce and Maria Concetta Cacciola were friends and were ready to talk. Both had children, and their information proved to be priceless. Desperate, their families used their children to try to get them back for the singular purpose of murdering them.
An impossible-to-put-down page-turner revealing the Mafia makeup and three courageous women who bore witness to save others.Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-265560-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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