A touching, if melancholy, feast for the senses, with a dash of inspiration for hearts in need of nourishment.
A former overseas bureau journalist recalls the tragic circumstances that befell her husband and the European city that repaired their broken spirit.
Butturini and her husband John Tagliabue returned to Rome in 1992 in a desperate attempt to rekindle the vibrant, happy life they’d embarked upon after falling in love there seven years prior. Both were foreign news reporters: The author was an East European correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, and Tagliabue was the Warsaw bureau chief for the New York Times. Butturini fondly revisits her travels to Rome in her early 30s, entranced by the stunning abundance of culture and embracing “the magic of honest food.” She and Tagliabue had been dispatched to Prague in late 1989 to report on the anti-Communist revolution, but the assignment was a violent disaster and the start of the couple’s “private tornado.” Butturini was beaten repeatedly in the street by anti-terrorist police, and her husband took a sniper’s bullet, shattering his pelvis. Long months of rehabilitation followed, as did a hepatitis B diagnosis and a bout of clinical depression, spurred on by the drowning death of Butturini’s mother. Recalling their everlasting love of Italy, they returned to Rome for much-needed healing, reinvigoration and the “normalcy” that had so lushly enveloped them years prior. Though Tagliabue’s extended illness tested her patience, a new life awaited them both. The author tempers both of their complicated, depressive family histories with memories of Sunday family dinners, homemade soups and pizzas, and childhood Christmases. “In our family the stomach was only slightly less important than the brain,” she writes, “and according to my mother, clearly more trustworthy and often more intelligent.”
A touching, if melancholy, feast for the senses, with a dash of inspiration for hearts in need of nourishment.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-59448-897-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2009
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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