An engaging, lasting monument to a courageous woman.
An irresistible mix of military history and the embellished anecdotes of villagers in Pico, Italy, as they adapt to World War II.
The narrative centers on life on the farm of Domenico Forte, just two kilometers from Pico. The book provides ample historical and geographical information on Pico, explaining why it was such a strategic location for the German army. It also recounts a droll, partially embellished account of Domenico and wife Maria Civita’s life on the farm. Maps, family photos and a list of suggested readings augment a colorful text that showcases the Forte family. Maria is a teenage bride in 1913 and an eventual mother of five–the first of whom is born in 1914, soon after Domenico leaves to seek work in the United States. He returns periodically but is again in America when war comes to Pico. The descriptions of Maria’s spirited defense of her home, and her chickens, against the German army unit camped on her farm form the high points of the memoir. The brutality of a band of rapacious Moroccan soldiers who swarm over Pico and the abandoned farm–as well as the family’s three days of hiding without provisions or dry clothes in a cave slimy with rainwater–comprise the low emotional points. Yet even in the misery of the cave, the youngest child attempts to cheer her mother by noting that at least when it rains "they don’t drop bombs on us." Despite hardships and danger, the entire family survives the war and settles in Massachusetts in 1947. The book is dedicated to Maria, who passed away in 2006. She epitomized the vitality and ingenuity that she ably passed on to her children.
An engaging, lasting monument to a courageous woman.Pub Date: May 18, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-595-51871-5
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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