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
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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