Heartfelt sketches of a deeply troubling era in Italian history.
Personable, gently humorous memories of adolescence under Mussolini by an Italian chef and author (A Thousand Bells at Noon: A Roman’s Guide to the Secrets and Pleasures of His Native City, 2002, etc.).
Romagnoli, who died in late 2008, turned 14 in 1939, when his homeland was seized by the nationalist fever incited by Il Duce and his Fascist Party. Living in a middle-class section of Rome with his father, mother and two siblings, young Romagnoli had sensed the ongoing “masquerade” since Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia several years earlier. While his gung-ho neighbors were vociferously devoted to the Fascist cause, Romagnoli’s father was a free-thinking agnostic who often received the dreaded cartoline rosse (“red postcards”), which summoned him to the police station for interrogation. As a result, his job promotions were thwarted. As the war progressed and rations were instituted, the family got by due to their enterprising mother’s cooking. The author became a bicycle messenger for his pro-partisan teachers and befriended a half-German schoolmate, Otto, who had more accurate news of the war. Called for military duty by the Fascists in early 1944, Romagnoli was determined not to help the Germans and fled to his aunt Elena’s farm in Frontale, where she ran the post office while also abetting partisans and refugees. The author assumed duties as a messenger and cook and became friendly with British and American officers organizing the command between the Allies and the partisans at San Vicino. It was a heady, dangerous time for the youth, and his portraits of these local heroes and villains form an invaluable depiction of a historically significant time and place.
Heartfelt sketches of a deeply troubling era in Italian history.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-312-55454-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2009
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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