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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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