Luzzi’s evocative personal history and incisive cultural critique illuminates the complex forces that have shaped his own...
Memoir from Luzzi (Italian/Bard Coll.; Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy, 2008, etc.), who, as the first American-born child of Italian immigrants, felt alienated from his parents’ roots.
Raised in suburban Rhode Island, educated at Tufts University and Yale, he felt closer to the aesthetically rarefied Italy of Dante and Michelangelo than to the poverty and superstition of his family’s native Calabria. There were two Italies, the poet Shelley had taught him, “one sublime and the other odious.” Popular media further fueled his “cultural schizophrenia,” with Italian-Americans portrayed as thugs in The Sopranos and The Godfather. Italian-American identity remains enigmatic, Luzzi believes, since “our pride in our ancestors grows with the distance we set between them and ourselves.” Attempting to bridge that distance, Luzzi embarked on a journey of discovery, examining the social, political and cultural differences between the wealthy, Europeanized north and the “carnal violence” of the south, his parents’ background, and his own fraught relationship with Florence, where he has lived. Family, he discovered, is central to Italian life. Mothers, for example, selflessly fulfill the needs of their sons well into adulthood. “In Italy,” Luzzi found, “unmarried men don’t cut the umbilical cord and apron strings; they stretch them out.” Family loyalty, though, prevents the formation of “informal civic traditions” that foster a sense of “national community.” Cynicism, coupled with a celebration of “the art of living rather than…the ties that bind” has resulted, Luzzi concludes, in “an unhealthy Italian body politic.” Italy today, writes the author, is mired in crisis: an aging population, deadening bureaucracy, rising unemployment and endless corruption.
Luzzi’s evocative personal history and incisive cultural critique illuminates the complex forces that have shaped his own identity. Being Italian and American, he comes to realize, has been both a bountiful gift and “an ethnic cross I had to bear.”Pub Date: July 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-374-29869-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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
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