A light and engaging visit to an Italian mountain valley town. Often it is necessary to go away to see what one has left behind. Tullio was born in the town of Gallinaro, in a mountain valley somewhere (as the title suggests) between Rome and Naples. After an education in England, he married an Irish artist, Susan Morley (whose wonderful line drawings illustrate the book), and settled in Ireland. Like many transplanted Italians, Tullio returns to his birthplace every summer. And, like those who return, he sees things in a different perspective. Where the natives are apathetic and resigned to things such as pollution, political corruption, and petty (and not so petty) crime, Tullio, with a good British sense of right and wrong, is outraged. But to no avail; as he himself recognizes, the Italians are a very conservative lot and it takes quite a bit to stir them to revolution. The town and the valley serve as a prism for the rest of Italy (“it is tempting to assume that all of Italy works in much the same fashion as the valley does”), while the myriad daily activities are delightfully recounted; from buying bread and roasting a pig, to picnics and religious feasts, to a quest to find the perfect swimming hole. There are insightful passages on the character of Naples, the politics of judging a local wine competition, microhistory, cafÇ life, religion, sex, fashion, and even directions on how to prepare sausages, liqueurs, sauces, and polenta. The book is slightly dated (most of the events seem to have taken place in the early- to mid-1990s), and the occasional Anglicism might throw some readers off (although others will find them charming). The cast of characters has been seen before, which gives the reader a sense of returning to old friends. A winsome visit to a part of Italy “off the beaten path.”
Pub Date: Oct. 15, 1998
ISBN: 0-312-19307-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1998
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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