Racconti da un Paese che Non C'è by Boleslaw Prus

 Racconti da un

Paese che Non C'è by Boleslaw Prus edited by Silvano De Fanti is a new book published by Marsilio. What I found fascinating in these series of short, shockingly beauty in their hallucinations, suggestions and visionarism tales is the lucid analysis of the society where Prus lived in, populated by avid and egoistic people but also miserable ones, orphans;  at the same time, in most cases, compassionate people will be the key for sorting out problems in the various characters's existences. It's a book that will let you think a lot about morality and kidness, generosity, amiability; help and avidity at large scale, without any possibility of redemption because the reality more strong than not some good suggestions sent by the other world for being of some help. I was heavily touched by the story of Jas, orphan and then alone, without enjoying a real life with the people with which he was living with, he will find a way for reaching for some help living at the same time weird and sad experiences. 

I was surprised by the hallucinations of a poor young still-not-yet doctor, who made many sacrifices for trying to eat something everyday, and, hungry and with a big fever, reached the hospital  in search of some warm; discovered by his colleague that he was sick he will remain there for being cured. During the high fever, he will make a dream, where sufferances are an honor and the biggest happiness good actions. Sufferances are indispensible doors for bettering the human beings and soul become more adult. 

Not only: what is reality if not a big complexity impossible to be understood in its totality but just in its little partiality by every man?

A very short tale is Shadows but not for this reason less powerful where there is a man who, everynight light all the lamps in the city with his own light in the head. The moral is that each of us has a special flame in the head and this flame serves for keeping light the our human way, our path; sometimes a person live unrecognized and he/she is understimated for then disappearing like a shadow...

Another one I loved a lot is the tale of Tomasz where there is at the end the donation of happiness and joy at a poor sick kid.

If you want to warm your heart, you must buy this book because it is simply exceptional and bewitched me!

I thank Marsilio for the physical copy of this book.

Anna Maria Polidori 

Life is Beautiful by Jacqueline Pirtle

 Life is Beautiful

by Jacqueline Pirtle is her latest new book. Author of 365 Days of Happiness, Parenting Through the Eyes of Lollipops and What it Means to BE a Woman, in this new book Jacqueline will tell us what to do for create everyday a beautiful life. 

We create our own reality, tell us Jacqueline and sometimes it is not the most satisfying one. 

We never think at it too often but "what we do, think, say, and who we choose to be, always affects everyone and everything" adds Jacqueline. Not only, she continues: "We are in charge and can

choose who we are, how we show up, and how we live this physical experience."

Energy is extremely important and it is important also where it is addressed. Energy means feelings,moments, happenings and thoughts. Your reality can change at anytime, nothing is never set in stone, writes Jacqueline. Being energy, as human beings, we change continuously and continuously there are mutations. 

Who is a beauty and a beautiful person? To Jacqueline not necessarily the body, but the energetic personaluty expressed by each individual. And, each individual can chooses the physical and emotional life he/she wants, living that, later in his/her reality. We must be careful in this sense and we must build a relaxing oasis of peace and harmony.

Of course you should ask to yourself what you want and what it is best for you.

Your inner YOU! knows the answer, and first of all, more than ask for some external advice, you should follow your inner self because with you, it has been around for some while and he knows the best thing to do.

Meditation, but also a good care of your emotional and physical wellbeing are important steps for living a beautiful life. 

   

Avoid negative thoughts, constantly emerging in particular thanks to other people. Listen to positive vibes. Keep them close to you, read them often, clean your soul and proceed along the long existential path more purified and more strong.

"I choose to BE and live, see, hear, taste, smell, think, and

feel that life is beautiful."

Choosing a beautiful life means that life will show you "its grace to the fullest ... When beauty and bliss is long-standing."

When you are happy you do everything more happily. 

Being happy reinforce our body that will be much more healthy.

Jacqueline's parents told her that "practice makes perfect!" Commitments are in fact extremely important for our personal growth, insists Jacqueline. 

It's important to grow a passion because in that case it's the heart that will produce feelings. 

And being devoted to your passion a second crucial step because it means that you can't live anymore without it. 

Sure, Jacqueline precises that "quite frankly in life nothing ever stays the same anyways."

Let's speak of our existences. If you ask to your relatives, friends, their impression during the time that they had created regarding you, you will assist at a differentiation of opinions, thanks also to the fact that we met some relatived and friends along our way and in different moments. 

Of course the ones reported by people, also when great friends, or wonderful relatives are their impressions, but...Who are we? No one knows our sufferances, joys, happinesses, realitistically. Not only: friends and relatives can't be accurate because they don't live in your body, and they didn't experienced what you experienced.

It's important to remain real experiencing the essence you were from the beginning and beyond, reports Jacqueline.

Jacqueline, then will let you experience an amazing moment: your arrival on Earth! 

Another beautiful self-help and motivational book for everyone!

I thank the Jacqueline Pirtle for the copy of this book.

Anna Maria Polidori 

Capturing Crime by Carol Taylor Narrative by Greg Marquis with Roslyn Rosenfeld and Connell Smith

 Carol Taylor is a Canadian sunny lady with a strong humanity. I met her online because of a painting spotted on the Facebook page of our common friend, the writer Beth Powning. In the past I read the book by Beth, The Hatbox Letters and, I fell in love for her writing.

Beth posted a beautiful, impressive painting made by Carol. It was Carol's mother; I would have discovered that she passed away two years ago. 

"A lady happy as a wife and mother, quilter and knitter for the community" said me later Carol. 

Finding the painting impressively beauty I contacted her. I didn't imagine the enthusiasm Carol would have put in our knowledge. She asked me where and how I knew Beth and Peter and I told her I was a reader passionate of her books.

Carol told me that she is a passionate of Italy. Unfortunately she said me, they had deleted the local art exhibit where the painting of her mother would have been exposed for Covid-19 reasons.

We were in march when the italian outbreak the most severe one in the entire Europe.

Carol told me in our conversations that she won, when little, in grade 11, a prize for poetry. Not only. She was encouraged to continue in her writings by her english teacher although she wanted to be an artist, using her hands for portraying reality. 

She did it, but as she added "Still making art but venturing into words. Making art that contained words."

Carol also told me that, she won another prize: a 6th prize in mix media at the Florence Biennale because someone told to someone else that she had written about a trip she attended to Florence, a city Carol adores and visited last year for the second time.

She jokes: "A friend said me I am not clear when I write; I didn't imagine I would have won  a prize at all!"

After this first and short conversation, Carol encouraged me of contacting her when I would have wanted because always online for writing (her husband is a columnist for a local newsmagazine), there was a long interruption. 

I started to follow compulsively news about Covid-19 I think as everyone. 

One day, months later, I thought that it was again time to re-contact Carol. She told me that there was a new art exhibit this time real and ready to be seen; it was about another work she did at long: I couldn't believe it, but Carol was and still is a sketcher in very famous Canadian trials of her territory, her Canadian city Saint John.

Following the trials of Jimmy "Whitey" Bulger, Tsarnaev (Boston Marathon Bombings), speaking about Boston, I started to consider the work done by sketchers in a trial absolutely beauty: sketchers are characters unknown in Italy but I have found always beautiful this work; being in contact, in direct contact with one of them amazing.

They are creative people and they live more than anyone else, maybe just like reporters do, a trial, because they are in grade of capturing facial expressions that woulde be left alone in opposite case, developing slowly or pretty rapidly an idea of what the story is about, moods of people, capturing sensations with rapidity. 

Carol wrote also a book telling to her own readers the most important criminal cases she followed, she told me all excited. I said her I am a book reviewer and I would have been happy to review her book, if she would have appreciated it. 

She sent me her book immediately, of course adding in the envelope several drawings and making the arrival of the copy a precious gift! In the dedication Carol wrote that this one is the first copy sent to Italy! Let's hope that other ones will be curious, in our country to discover her works! 

The title of this captivating book with a wonderful smell! :-) I love smelling books, no sure you, and format is Capturing

Crime. Written with Greg Marquis, Roslyn Rosenfeld and Connell Smith the title couldn't be more appreciated and choosed well! 

Carol, in this activity, put all herself. Being a compassionate lady she will judge the various cases she worked in, like a mother, an artist, a person, a woman.

At first, before that the government cutback fundings for trial sketchers, she worked pretty intensely and heavily; reading one of her typical day meant like to read the story of a hurricane lady, divided between courts, TV stations, family, meals, children...

Carol attended in 1959-1961 Saint John Vocational School in Saint John, the city where she would have worked mostly. A man, Ted Campbell who had attended the Chicago Art Student League taught her how to draw what was "in front of her." 

So, later, thanks to these lessons she made a living working as a commercial artists at the Evening Times Global Telegraph-Journal, as fashion illustrator and later as a court sketcher.  The major Canadian media CBC, CTV, Global Canadian Press and the Telegraph-Journal have called her over the past thirty years. 

Sketches are important in Canadian trials because cameras are not admitted and so the mark of the passage of a trial, sentences apart, and journalistic work apart, are these sketches portraying judges, criminals, attorneys and so on.

In the 80s Carol covered 48 trials; in the 90s 33 more, and only with the advent of 2000s and cutbacks her presence less and less requested. Just in rare cases Carol attends trials at the moment; where there is more interest, where cases are bigger, but sure, the present is not anymore like the past.

In the book Carol signals me that on January 1989 for the first time a video was shown in the Hampton Courthouse.

Carol tells also the various differences between the several courthouses where she worked with and in. She preferred of course the largest ones; some were pretty littles and intimate for using this expression and her work wasn't simple.

Sketching means rapidity because that person won't stay sat in that place all the time; a sketch is not a painting where the person is in pose. 

Cases followed by Carol have been the most diversified one. A case interested Richard Hatfield in 1985 an important politician. They found him with some marijuana and at that time there wasn't any kind of legalization of the substance. There was a big trial, the news was lived scandalistically. This politician, leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of New Brunswick loved and appreciated and in love for art became a sort of devil for the community and at the end although he fought for being re-elected, he couldn't make it anymore. He died also pretty soon.

Not only: once the trial was over Hatfield asked to Carol one of her sketches! He was a man with sense of humor and art in his heart, this is for sure. Carol added that he financed a lot of artistic initiatives and after all, writes Carol, marijuana was and is largely used by everyone also by politicians, etc.

So...

Noel Michael Winters and Paul Haines Trials 1984. They  were terrible criminals. Not only Winters  killed several people but dismembered their bodies. It was an ugly story. People involved thought that if they didn't cooperate with him, they could have been killed.

Allan Legere Tood Metchett and Scott Curtis Murder Trial 1987 was another strong case. 

Legere was a character with a complicated and distorted personality. A sort of doctor Jekyl and Mr. Hyde; not only; from his more tender age he was a little criminal, delevoping the art of being a dishonest person pretty soon.

The trial is about the murder of a man in his 60s left with broken face bones, strangled and the wife, beaten, sexually abused  and left for dead. But she survived.

Legere de facto became later a sort of celebrity murderer.

The case of Anthony Romeo 1988 the one of a disturbing man that killed just because  thought mentally that the man in front of him was a monster able to alter his future plans.

The Colombian Drug Smuggling Prosecution 1989 was sensational for the presence of security guards considering the topic of the case. Cocaine became always more important for international criminals like Pablo Escobar. At that time cocaine was only for rich people, and arrived in a weekly base in Canada with the complicity of many people inside the system. Just few drug was intercepted.  A dirty job this one. Douglas Jaworski a pilot, involved in the cartel of medelin decided to collaborate with RCMP with a plan. He asked to being placed in the witness protection program, helping later to set up the operation. Many people were arrested, including, of course colombian pilots. 

Remember Legere? We meet him again. With, for the first time, the use of the DNA for sorting out the problem.

In a way or in another Legere, convicted of murder in 1987, brought to Moncton for a medical appointment, escaped away.

The following months an escalation of violence interested the region of Miramichi but it was only when a priest of the catholic church in Chatham Head, Father James V.Smith was killed with a knife that the police men didn't have any doubts: this one was a work done by Allan Legere. It is an amazing tale the one of the capture of Legere. Later he was accused of the murder of Annie Flam, Linda and Donna Daughney and Father Smith.

Samantha Daw Toole, 6 years was found dead on the banks of the Saint John's river. Evidences revealed that she was also sexually assaulted before to be killed. The family of this kid was incredibly complicated, with a domestic existence close to the one of a nightmare; the couple was dysfunctional, and soon sunspects started to take a terrible shape: the one of George Pitt, the companion of the mother of Samantha. The trial in this case was celebrated in 11 days in 1994. Notices were sent to more than 80 jurors but just 30 and something showed up at the Saint John County Courthouse on Sydney Street.

The prosecutor was James McAvity assisted by Tony Allman the leader prosecutor of the Legere prosecution.

You will find other trials explained in words and sketches in the book.

This book is beautiful for everyone, to my point of view. For understanding the system, trials, if you have curiosity for murders and people who work behind as Carol Tyler does for many decades, giving a look at criminals, judges, people attending the trial; if you love art, sketches, drawings.

Personally at first I was a bit "scared" because I personally didn't know Canada as well as I know the USA; it is a country more reserved; same story for their most important trials and judiciary cases; I didn't have any clue of them. 

I found that the warm approach used by Carol, the complete full-immersion in every trial she was part in, using words and sketches, the familiar, colloquial approach made me feel like at home.

New World Publishing is the publishing house that released this book; elegant and important book,you'll adore it!

Highly recommended for sure!

I thank Carol for this beautiful book!

Anna Maria Polidori 

 

Meals Matter A Radical Economics Through Gastronomy by Michael Symons

 I spent a lot of time before to read this book Meals Matter A Radical Economics Through Gastronomy by

Michael Symons. Published by Columbia Press, when I received it maybe, for the first time, I understood with all the possible gravity, what this pandemic influenza means in terms of eating. Not that I didn't rationally knew it; I was perfectly conscious what this influenza pandemic would have meant in terms of quality-life; I knew that it would have meant also not being anymore as hospitables as we were.

Just: it is sad.

We have always been a family pretty hospitable; italians, Americans, Russian friends, our family have known the world thanks to  good, lucullian lunches, where projects started, ideas grew up, dreams became realities.

Now, social distancing must be a self-imposition and it will pass a lot of time before to seeing  a new, relaxing and reassuring reality.

I think that the phrase can give you the idea of what you will read could be this one: "This is my socially, culturally, and naturally destructive society, in which the overtourism industry has turned the world into a a selfie-stick spectacle, warranting my push toward simplicity in the sense of being more in tune with life's elements."

The analysys of Simons, reporter and owners of restaurants spaces in the Old Greek and the liberism passing through our times and seeing and reading the contradictions that are still keeping a large part of the population poor and without sufficient food in a daily base. Food is also a political and social theme treated by governments and politicians according to their own vision or better, the vision of... money; the birth of fast food and the demolition of eating delicious meals without rush; people not anymore in grade to recognize what it is good and what it is bad, accepting what it is given to them with resignation, passivity. 

I loved reading the story of Epicurus; his philosophy of living substantially with simplicity and surely not alone, but surrounded by a group of friends and people who embraced his way of living. He organized always a feast for celebrating conviviality and life was lived and planned while enjoying a good lunch  all together.

Epicurus will be also later studied by several  philosophers like Hume, Rousseau for explaining much better old ideas that needed to be put into new concepts for a society changed by events and time; in synthesis what the old men said was to eat well and never alone where possible, because food is synonime of conviviality; and to eat for living, not living for eat. 

This book is for everyone who want to discover more about food, societies, policy, sociology and philosophy.

Highly recommended.

I thank Columbia University Press for the physical copy of this book.

Anna Maria Polidori 

 

Doppio Silenzio by Gianni Farinetti

 Doppio Silenzio

by Gianni Farinetti is a little intriguing book.

The set of the story Palermo, one of the sunniest and most mysterious cities of Italy and the protagonist Sebastiano Guarenti. Invited at a wedding of the high society of the city while he is flying to Palermo reads the news of a fresh murder in the city.

Once in the city he will re-meet his old friends; at the same time he will meet also the relatives of the bride; but Diego and Giulia, two siblings will be the characters that will attract him a lot because pretty mysterious. 

After the wedding, Sebastiano plans the return that same evening in the North of Italy, but while in the taxi, notices a guy who looked-like as his Nicola an old passionate flame of 20 years ago with which he had had a relationship; Sebastiano changes his plans. 

He decides to stay to Palermo for searching for this boy and for discovering much more who he is.

The story narrated, I can't tell too much, will be of great intensity. There is a boy searching for an escapism, profoundly unhappy because of the relationship he is living at many levels with another man: a boy who pronstitute himself not just for money but for presenting pleasure to his companion; a companion in love for someone else.  There are other shocking truths hidden behind...

It is a homosexual story, after all, treated with great tenderness and affection, revealing the extreme sacrifices that can be done for setting free the loved ones.

 Highly recommended.

I thank Marsilio for the physical copy of this book.

Anna Maria Polidori 

The Fury Archives Female Citizenship, Human Rights, and the International Avant-Gardes by Jill Richards

 The Fury Archives

Female Citizenship, Human Rights, and the International Avant-Gardes by Jill Richards is an amazing book reporting what women wanted in the past centuries and decades and how they influenced in many different ways their requests to a society too blind for answering.

Maybe not everyone know it, but avant-gardes and women's rights sang the same song together.

Why this? Thanks to an international socialist in grade of printing wagons of radical newspapers, journals, across the Atlantic.

These ideas, these whispers didn't remain confined in the USA, but reached the various Continents stimulating a fertile debat, opening new doors and visions.

Why Richards called this book The Fury Arcihives, using Fury for defining women? In part because it is an adjective fury that can define women as a creature irrational, with uncheck emotions. 

A woman at that time could have a role as a politician, a suffragette for  women's rights but she didn't have any kind of consideration  in the rest of her human sphere. 

Divided in three parts, in the first chapter the trial against five women accused of arson in Paris. There was a lot of excitement on this trial; just the idea that five women did it was absolutely something weird, but when the trial started and everyone discovered the heroines of the case, everyone focused the attention on the ugly faces of the various five women involved in the trial. 

Richards writes: "They were political actors but not citizen. They were human, but not subject to the rights of man."

In a society dominated by men women were seen as irrealistic creatures, unnatural. 

Le Figaro wrote that women wanted something else: a different existence, it was 1871, because not anymore happy of their existence at home, a behavior, wrote Magnard the reporter, leading to the ruin. 

Human rights, the ones focused in Magnard's piece, after all, typical in a society.

Maybe the most known girls and ladies passed to history have been absolutely the suffragettes. These girls and ladies fought for the possibility of voting, a right, that one, just for men.

Women thought that they had a lot to saying and didn't want to stay anymore at the window, looking at what was going on in this world without saying anything.

It became a literary world the one of suffragettes. A first example is Henry James and his The Bostonians where Olive asks to Verena of giving up her passion for men, dedicating the existence to their cause. As you will see Verena will win her battles and will marry a conservative man, while Olive will remain unsatisfied of her existence, alone.

Virginia Wollf was skeptical regarding the role of feminists and suffragists in the society portraying them as solitary people who remained alone forever because of their choices.

Ann Veronica by Wells tries as sort of escapism, starting a menage with a married man who can't divorce.

In The Sentinel by Rebecca West there is a girl who fall sexually in love for a guy with too much simplicity so, for this reason she won't marry him.

Another important fight for women was birth control. Women were prolific at that time, the end of 1800s, the beginning of 1900s so that in Switzerland, in Italy, a bit everywhere appeared pamphlet explaining how to avoid unwanted children and first of all, pregnancies. Children were a pillar and an important element in particular in  families of peasants, because they meant, if they survived, hands for domestic works, pretty heavy at that time. Sure, because of pregnancies and hard work girls close to the end of the 20s could be considered old in certain European countries. Life expectations wasn't long like the one that there is today, plus of course bad existence didn't help at all.

In the USA and in particular in the planter class there was a great domination of infanticides. A census from 1790 to 1860, examines the death of sixty thousand slave infants. Abolitionists remarked how the poor, horrible conditions in which people lived brought at these desperate and insane gestures.

The possibility of choosing when having a child is a great right because avoid terrible gestures, helping the mother; where this one wants to leave the baby in the hospital abandoning him because can't cure him for financial reasons, in Italy for example, she can does it.

A chapter involves Marchesa Casati; free and disinibited spirit, she was at long the lover of Gabriele D'Annunzio. 

Casati left Italy in 1922, when the regime of Mussolini was installed, but previously she spent some time in Capri a place adored by homosexuals of high society.

Why starting with Marchesa Casati? Because her ambivalence can clarify the situation of other women less privileged than her and so submitted to men. Promiscuity or loving people of the same sex was still a big taboo.

Why homosexuality was not seen well in Italy? Because it didn't bring new children and it was sterile under many ways.

Again in Weineger's account women were irrationals, people without too much consideration while men were rational, secure of themselves, having the best characteristics of this world.

Women needed to stay home, without thinking too much while they could study, learning, discovering culture, politics, arts.

Racism. Of genre, but always racism.

There were countries pretty opened and for this reason, also, many people afforded there. France and Paris were places where everyone could live with freedom his/her sexuality.

In France on 1928 was published Recherches sur la Sexualite a book that wanted to clarify all the possible doubts regarding sex, positions, orgasm, menage a trois, light on or off during sexual intercourses, men preferring older or younger women, and much more.

Although homosexuality could start to be tolerated somewhere, in other parts of Europe was highly condemned and lesbians seen as transgender.

Of course, as said before what scared to death the most conservative part of the society was the sterility, and also the idea that this fragmentation would have brought confusion and the end of a fertile society with a family well defined.

Claude Cahun is an example of a creative woman that as you can see  through her photographs, tried, with humor to express herself. Cahun was a big activist and her biography is remarkable.

A book that you must buy if you think that women fought for rights and still are fighting for new rights! every day of their existence.

Highly recommended.

I thank Columbia University Press for the physical copy of this book.

Anna Maria Polidori 

Auschwitz by Frediano Sessi

 Frediano Sessi is an authority on books about Auschwitz; he is clear, concise, at the same time he is plenty of stories, anecdotes. He has written for remembering what it was, for remembering the atrocities committed by german Nazis and for remembering the place, Auschwitz and people spent years there. In this latest work published by Marsilio, Auschwitz,

Storia e Memorie Sessi tells what it was Auschwitz, how and why, forst of all the camp was created. Not only: the birth of Birkenau, differentiations, love stories lived by prisoners where possible, languages spoken in the camp, buildings, works done by prisoners, methods for eliminating prisoners. Gas chambers with Zyklon B, the most known one, prisoners previously were examined, and nazis removed gold teeeth, rings etc before to starting these "showers".  Death reached prisoners also because of malnutrition. Located close to the city, Auschwitz became with the time and after the last World War Conflict the symbol of the Nazi horror.

Everything could be useful to Germans; from hair to jewels, once the camp was set free, what allied discovered was a shocking reality.

With the time and decades digging for the most diversified reasons, people found out written material of several prisoners about their existence in the camp. Sometimes these prisoners didn't survive.

Analyzed also the percentage of people closed to Auschwitz per country. The country with more deported was Ungheria with 437.685; then Polland, France. Italy deported 7.827 souls. Norwegian 690.

When I interviewed Lee Staub a Jew from Ukraine, deported to Auschwitz, I asked him if it was possible to escape away from that camp. I won't never forget his expression; it was as if he was seeing again the camp, if he was still there; he said me, just with a whisper of his voice: "Trust me, it was impossible to do that" with sadness and resignation. 

Yes, it was and who tried to do that as Mala Zimetbaum and Edeck Galinski who run away from the camp of Birkenau were captured, tortured; for not being killed by Nazis, they both tried to kill themselves without success.

Someone tried and this time with success! 

The story of Jerzy Bielecki and Cyla Cybulska is beautiful. They escaped away, they won! saving their existences and re-meeting each other only 39 years after that courageous gesture. 

When Nazis understood that they would have lost the war, tried to eliminate part of the physical evidencies of their horror, although prisoners busy in this work will sabotage in various different ways the purpose of Nazis for let see to the allies of seeing what it was going on in the camps.

Trying to evacuate the camp the most robut prisoners were constricted to march somewhere else with Nazis. While Primo Levi was forced to stay in the camp because as many other people sick, his best mate could go; anyway  these marches in the profound cold and heavy snow meant for most of these people a certain death.

Once the camp was set free, departments in the past devoted to horrors of various genres became places where people could heal from physical and psychological wounds.

Reunions with families and places of origin took place after a lot of months.

Auschwitz became a museum where it is possible to go for understand what happened during the last Second World War.

From books to movies, memory of what has been has always been a priority, and many physical witnesses spread the word not just for not forget, it would be impossible, but for avoid another horror like this one.

Highly recommended to everyone!

I thank Marsilio for the physical copy of this book.

Anna Maria Polidori