Through dogged efforts and happenstance, Viviano pieces together a tale of thwarted love and murder, but his warm and...
A reporter’s strange odyssey into a dark family history, set against the violence, secrets, and ancient ways of Sicily.
San Francisco Chronicle foreign correspondent Viviano (Dispatches From the Pacific Century, 1993) had a special affinity for his grandfather, a proud, enigmatic Sicilian with whom he shared an enduring wanderlust. Before his death in 1993, his grandfather revealed to him a family legend of lu monacu (“the monk”): The author’s great-great-grandfather was a notorious Sicilian bandit who dressed himself as a priest and was killed in a vendetta with the Mafioso Domenico Valenti in 1870s. Like all good reporters, Viviano was unable to pass up a story, so he set off for Sicily to unearth the reality behind this family myth. In the little town of Terrasini, the author quickly made his way among the hospitable locals and was “adopted” by the Meddicani (Sicilians who had repatriated from America). This warm reception hid darker realities, however, and his investigation was initially stymied by archivists, bureaucrats, and local gossips alike. Viviano found himself haunted (and the locals “entranced”) by the ongoing Mafia trials, which followed the assassination of numerous law enforcement figures. He met the revered prosecutor Judge Falcone (who seemed to “direct his own murder trial from the grave”) and his nemesis Toto Riina (a vicious Don who murdered the entire families of the pentiti, or testifying mobsters). He eventually came to view the legendary Sicilian brand of chesty, libertarian self-interest as a metaphor of the world at large, just as he became entranced with the customs of the region—the robust meals, eccentric companions, criminal fiefdoms, and ominous traditions of loyalty and silence.
Through dogged efforts and happenstance, Viviano pieces together a tale of thwarted love and murder, but his warm and (mostly) convincing take on the world’s most permanent outlaw society is ultimately more memorable.Pub Date: May 8, 2001
ISBN: 0-671-04158-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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