A book for Levi completists and students of the Italian Resistance. Luzzatto provides a decent picture of the Italian...
Luzzatto (History/Univ. of Turin; Padre Pio: Miracles and Politics in a Secular Age, 2010, etc.) combines his obsessions with Primo Levi (1919-1987) and the Italian Resistance.
The armistice signed with the Allies by no means ended the war in Italy. The Allies supplied arms to the Italian army in the south and the partisans in the north but distrusted the native resistance and the communists. The Germans reacted by rescuing Mussolini from captivity and establishing the second fascist regime as the Social Republic of Salò. Thus began a war of liberation in addition to civil war. The fascist/Nazi government was the target of those young men, many of them Turinese Jews, in the Valle d’Aosta who were “inventing the Resistance.” Many of them were untrained hotheads and roughnecks with little leadership. Levi was a part of that group, and the author seeks answers to an “ugly secret” mentioned in Levi’s book of short stories published in 1975, The Periodic Table. On Dec. 13, 1943, the local prefect set in motion a plan to gather up draft evaders and all Jews now subject to arrest under a new police directive. Edilio Cagni and his two henchmen, Alberto Bianchi and Domenico De Ceglie, led the Salò and German forces to the mountain hideouts. Levi was taken prisoner and sent to Auschwitz. He didn’t return to Italy until 1945, but his writings are what led Luzzatto to dig deeply into the truth of his sentence, of the men who betrayed them, and of the reprisals and vendettas that lingered for years. Though periodically intriguing, the book is lacking as an attempt to explain the Italian Resistance, perhaps covering too small an area. The somewhat disjointed narrative features characters introduced and then ignored.
A book for Levi completists and students of the Italian Resistance. Luzzatto provides a decent picture of the Italian character, the wide variance of political parties, and the dedication of the people to their country.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9955-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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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