A light and sweet account of an outsider’s encounter with Italy’s education system, customs, and cuisine.
An American physician takes a post teaching English to Italian schoolchildren in this debut memoir.
Disillusioned with medicine and a dead-end relationship, Morris accepted a temporary teaching position in the small Italian city of Civitanova, exchanging public school classes and private tutoring for free room and board with his charming host family, the Pezzonis. Morris experienced Italian life outside of the tourist centers of Rome and Florence and certainly cut an anomalous figure while doing it: a middle-aged American man in a school operated almost entirely by stylish Italian women, lacking a salary or car and subsequently totally dependent on his hosts. He was virtually the only American tutor in the area who was male or above the age of 30. Yet the education challenges he encountered should be familiar to teachers from all walks of life: overcrowded classrooms, easily distracted and hormonally charged students, and institutional chaos. Morris was a committed, genuinely passionate teacher, and as the semester progressed he explored techniques to engage both his rambunctious public school students and his private pupils. He eventually became the strict yet beloved disciplinarian of the school and, at the end of the year, organized an English-speaking contest that culminated in an emotional awards ceremony. Meanwhile, he sampled the neighborhood winery at bargain prices, introduced his Italian hosts to American-style chili, and engaged in brief flirtations with his fellow teachers. The narrative fires rapidly through encounters with many different students, which can make keeping track of who is who difficult. Morris expresses frustrated bemusement at his American colleagues’ inability to articulate why they are teaching English in Italy but doesn’t share an answer for himself. A more probing exploration of Morris’ own past and psyche, beyond a few hints regarding romantic strife, professional frustration, and familial estrangement, would render his triumphs and failures more impactful. Leaving the story of a man walking away from his old life essentially untold, the book instead delivers a slight travelogue that overflows with Morris’ clear love of Italian culture, food, and people.
A light and sweet account of an outsider’s encounter with Italy’s education system, customs, and cuisine.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5372-3934-7
Page Count: 190
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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