Il Museo delle Promesse Infrante by Elizabeth Buchan

 Il Museo

delle Promesse Infrante by Elizabeth Buchan is pretty diversified.

I found it, I confess, pretty dispersive, because the thematics opened by the author are many and maybe because I would have preferred to read  more adventures and magic of the museum of broken promises (hoping to read a book of museum of kept promises, we musn't be constantly pessimistic regarding the human nature) than the heavy, complicated, multiform past of Laure.

I have been to Prague during the Communism, 1989, close to the end of this dictatorship, so I tend to read books where Prague is one of the main attractions because I left there a good part of my heart! It's a city simply enchanting and unique.

Said this, the story starts with a failed marriage, the one of Laure, the idea, being childless and completely alone of opening a museum of broken promised, a choice, this one, because of her connection with the past, in the enchanting city of Paris. The musem is not just successful: the museum is great because puts in connection the feelings of people with the objects that they find in the place, and rooms that they visit. Sometimes their reactions are violents, other ones more calm but always profound. 

Laure hides a lot of her personal story and starts to be affectionated to a starved, loney cat.

A reporter from the South of the Usa, young and with the desire of writing a good piece in connection with Vanity Fair, contacts Laure. Laure is diffident because young reporters are more aggressive than the rest of the category to her point of view.

Slowly, the museum becomes always more pale while the main story becomes the one experienced by her when she was as an au-pair in Prague, baby-sitting two children and spending time with a depressed woman and a husband worried for his wife. That ones were the years of the Communism and people whispered more than talking, together, spied, considered enemies if they spoke a fluent english. Soon Laure meets along her way an artist, Simon who is also trying to make oppisition to the regime...

Plenty of questions that will be resolved at the end, there won't be a happy end in the classic way we imagine it: the author hasn't completely captured what it meant the lack of freedom in the Communist Prague to me, but she went close to it. 

It was a palpable feeling and a sufferance that was in grade of capturing every sphere of the person.

Said that, the book is a good reading for sure and I highly recommend it to you.

Anna Maria Polidori 

L'homme qui plantait des Arbres by Jean Giono

His name was Elzéard Bouffier and he was universally known as the man who planted trees thanks to a little book L'homme

qui plantait des arbres written by Jean Giono. Elzéard was born in Provence.Jean Giono met just for case this solitary man. He was walking in an area in Provence pretty poor of water and trees. But...What Giono was searching was some water although he had also found a nasty wind, pretty strong considering that trees couldn't keep it gentle because the area poor of them.

He met, so, along his way, this solitary house, with a solitary man in company of a solitary, nice and peaceful dog. Jean Giono decided to stay for another day, if for that man was fine. Elzéaber didn't mind, and Giono observed him more closely. He had planted wagons of trees, before his arrival and he would have continued per years. That one was his solitary mission: no one asked him of doing so.

Elzéard as tells well Giono, had lost his wife and son and so he spent his time planting trees. Per kilometers. You musn't imagine that Elzéard planted in little areas. Giono re-visited that places years after, discovering a different nature, real forests, many real ones! thanks to this very good man with which he became with the time good friend of.

Plants are a reality extremely crucial for men. They have always been but now...that nature can in a daily base kill us, because we have killed our environment, altering it, we must plant all new trees: the killing of the lung of the Planet, the Amazon must be interrupted: impossible to think, with all the respect for Jeff Bezos, nothing personal, that his virtual Amazon is successful, and the real one is dying and with it the humanity: planting trees will become a rush for everyone.

I highly suggest to all of you the reading of this book. It is lovely and simply touching!

Anna Maria Polidori 

A Sweet View The Making of an English Idyll by Malcolm Andrews

 A Sweet View

The Making of an English Idyll by Malcolm Andrews is a new book released  November 24 by Reaktion. 

The title Sweet View is taken from a phrase expressed by Jane Austen when, writing, described in the book Emma what she was seeing as "a sweet view." 

An enchanting nature,the british one: I fall in love for example for a website called Pictures of England, where you  find wagons of pictures of a stunning british countryside.

This book analyzes british painters in love for their countryside, but also what writers said on the stunning, fresh and perpetually harmonic british lands, with its specific characteristics as for example, churches,  cottages, castles. In general their observations were the ones of enchanted people in a wonderful and idylliac world.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: "England is a garden... Under an ash-colored sky, the fields have been combed and rolled till they appear to have been finished with a pencil instead of a

plough."

Horace Walpole complained: there were few paintings and few painters interested in portraying the beautiful and fresh british countryside.

Frederick Law Olmsted built Central Park and once in England remained enchanted by what he saw.

John Constable created with his The Cornfield, firstly appeared in public in 1826, the perfect scenario of the rural countryside.

A book analyzing portraits of estimated painters and written words of beloved writers for giving to the reader the exact poeticity felt and seen in the past like in the present: the key makers of the so-called "South Country rural idyll goes to painters like Palmer, Birket, Foster and Jefferies. 

Beautifully arugumented and illustrated, goes for it if you are fascinated by countrysides, and the beauty and fascination of it.

Highly recommended.

I thank Reaktion for the copy of the book.

Anna Maria Polidori 

Resetting Our Future Long Haul COVID: A Survivor’s Guide Transform Your Pain and Find Your Way Forward by Joseph J. Trunzo, Julie Luongo

 Resetting Our Future

Long Haul COVID: A Survivor’s Guide Transform Your Pain and Find Your Way Forward by Joseph J. Trunzo, Julie Luongo is maybe one of the first self-help books directly involving COVID-19. The publishing house of this book is Changemakers Books: once started the pandemic they decided of giving voice to the problematic appeared because of the Covid-19. Considering that we will still have to cope with COVID and what it means a pandemic for a while, these books can be useful for trying to find some relief.The website of the publishing house is www.resiliencebooks.com.

Mahatma Gandhi said once that the future its up to us and what we do today. For sure we have much more responsibilities in terms of life and death than what we had these past years. A vaccine can protect people and entire communities, reducing the mortality, hospitalization and possibility of infecting other people. The pandemic brought on the table of the existence thematic of great immensity. We discovered that our eco-system re-started to breath, oh yes, also pretty largely, when we were all closed home. Animals re-occupied their places in the past were dominated by us: at the same time the climate changes assumed a different importance, because this one can be just the beginning of a series of pandemics brought by the mutation of meteorological conditions and what it is going on in the North and South Pole.

Sure, as Americans love to saying: We're All in This Together. But... what doest it mean? That there is not a person in this world who hasn't been altered by COVID. A pandemic involves every sphere of the human condition: social, economical, psychological, physical, familial. There is not an untouched sphere in this extraordinary condition that won't touch men.

No one would want to suffer: this is true; but not seeing what it is going on could be worse. The method proposed by the authors for our case (we are all sick from COVID, also if we haven't been yet infected and maybe we won't be, because we don't live anymore with tranquillity but with stress levels pretty high) is called ACT and was firstly studied for other illnesses like the Lyme Syndrome caused by a bite of a tick. While dosctors are still debating if this illness exists or not, patients cope with a lot of pains at various levels: physical, psychological.

This method, so, has been adopted also for refreshing the body and spirit of people affected by COVID-19.

"ACT is grounded in an extremely well-researched model called Relational Frame Theory, which focuses on how our minds form relations and use symbols and language to make

connections in our mental processes." This method will help you to live in the present, bettering the quality of your thoughts for staying more tranquil and relaxed.

It is a good reading. I warmly suggest it to you.

In nome della verità by Viveca Sten

 Not just an unputtable down book this one written by Viveca Sten In Nome della Verità

, but let me add, the most beautiful one of the beloved swedish author, to my point of view.

The story you will see will be pretty intricated and will be.. A story in the story in the several cases taken in consideration. I can't launch myself this time in spoilers because I would ruin the surprise, but let's put things in this way: thematic treated are serious, intense, reals and most of the times, dramatics.

One of the first themes taken in consideration is bullism, a condition where the so-called more prepotents children abuses verbally and physically of pacific and in peace with themselves, children: then another problem experienced in too many cases is paedophilia, the biggest crime that a revoltating beast can does against a poor and innocent kid; the third theme is a financial trial; the fourth one the possibility of dangerous escapisms. In these stories, connected together, we assist also at the private problems of Thomas and Nora with their partners.

The story is this one: Benjamin, an 11 years old boy is sent by his father at the velistic school located in an island close to Sandhamn: this man is a witness in a financial trial, (where the prosecutor is Nora) involving his ex-friend accused of having stolen wagons of money. Benjamin doesn't start a fantastic vacation: he is attacked by oldest, prepotent teenagers but his bad luck doesn't end there for sure, because, bad companions apart, he receives the attention of a real dangerous, dangerous paedophile...  

I won't tell nothing else. I read this book in a few hours! Enthusiastic! 

Fantastic book!

Highly recommended.

I thank Marsilio for the physical copy of the book! 

Anna Maria Polidori 

Practically Pagan An Alternative Guide to Magical Living by Maria DeBlassie

 Practically Pagan

An Alternative Guide to Magical Living by  Maria DeBlassie attracted me so badly. I was ready of using the magical spells for wishes or, telling the truth, just for trying to see if magic works. 

Forget it. 

This one is a self-help book with a touch of magic, but nothing else,  because as explains the author, although a doctorate and a successful existence, she needed to discover something else.

In this book you will find a lot of advice for going on in the existence in a very gracious way; from gym to food and the creation of more physical space for your exigencies, and many other suggestions for bettering your existence in a physical and emotional level.

Interesting book because written with passion and competence and with some magical sparks!

Highly ecommended.

I thank John Hunt Publishing for the physical copy of this book.

Anna Maria Polidori 

A Schoolboy’s Wartime Letters by Geoffrey Iley

 A Schoolboy’s Wartime Letters

by Geoffrey Iley is an enchanting, enchanting book.

The letters in questions, first of all this is an epistolary book of letters sent to the parents and relatives of Geoffrey, were found when Geoffrey a pretty mature man. He was pleasantly surprised to seeing that all the letters sent and received a lot of time ago were still there, waiting for him.

A lonely child, because of work, Geoffrey's family afforded to Birmingham. Years, that ones, where the cold winds of war were whispering always more persisting. We are at the end of the 1930s. Geoffrey, also for preserving him during that horrible phase for Europe was sent in schools distant from that city, for completing the years.

The letters you'll read documents his weekly activities. From the games he loved to play with, the request for his violin, and many times!!! for stamps: the polemic because of censorship, blue pencil!, passing throught the several illnesses he was affected of or were affected his friends: he concluded most of the time reassuring his parents. Food in the first school wasn't great at all, and at first, because of this reason, he fell ill. He also felt melancholy because he had left his home, but in this case after a short time, recovered successfully well.

His parents were also taking in consideration, if Germans would have occupied the UK, of sending him in the USA, an hypothesis later discarded.

At that time correspondence was the only way for receiving news, gifts, postcards from someone distant. Geoffrey asked for books, for games, bycicles, money, everything you can imagine he could ask for, being satisfied all the times, but not only: her mother sent him also delicious fruits and cakes that he consummed in his bedroom!

I also noticed that Geoffrey, in opposite case avide letter-writer, postponed or interrupted his writings  when it was teatime, a sacred moment for everyone in the UK. 

At the end of the school Geoffrey started a first experience as engineer apprentice becoming much more with the time and building a beauty existence. 

But...But...What you will love the most of his character is that, although little, Geoffrey had a solid, strong character, pretty technical and mathematical, being also happy, cheerful ironic and mature at the same time.

It was a great joy reading this book, where we can see a correspondence spanning through all the years of the Second World War.

Highly recommended book.

I thank John Hunt Publishing for the copy of the book.

Anna Maria Polidori