An exuberant account of love and great Italian food.
An American woman falls in love with an Italian man, his ebullient family, and a vibrant city.
In her warmhearted debut memoir, Wilson recounts arriving in Naples in 1996, just graduated from college, to embark on a three-month internship at the U.S. Consulate. Naples, “dirty and dangerous,” seemed to her tony friends and family an odd choice, but for the author, it amounted to a bit of rebellion. “I spent my childhood overachieving,” she writes. “It was time for a change.” Through the consul, who was a family friend, she met Raffaella Avallone, a glamorous 56-year-old who traveled in the best Neapolitan circles. Raffaella set her up on a date with her son, Salvatore, a handsome 23-year-old with an “adorable laugh,” and Wilson was smitten—not only with Salva, but also with his entire welcoming, embracing family and a culture that exalted the art of dining. Once a self-confessed binge eater, the author discovered a new relationship to food. “In Neapolitan culture,” she writes, “mealtimes are sacred—food is freshly prepared and consumed in campagnia. There is no rushing.” In the Avallones’ kitchen, Wilson watched as Raffaella prepared the delectable dishes that her family loved, such as eggplant parmigiana, ragu, and octopus salad, for which Wilson includes recipes. Enraptured with Naples, the author was surprised when Salva, visiting her in the U.S., became “enthralled by…a consumer culture that was much more advanced than that of Italy.” He quickly learned that phrases like “reward points, preferred customer, and supersaver” could lead to bargains. Wilson managed to live in Italy for several years, enrolling in a graduate program in international studies, teaching English, and pursuing her dream of acting—all while waiting for Salva to propose. But their big wedding in Washington, D.C., perplexed the Avallone family: there was no pasta.
An exuberant account of love and great Italian food.Pub Date: April 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9816-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
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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