“I fought against white domination and against black domination.” After finishing the book, we felt sad but full of hope. Guilty despite being innocent. Filled with remorse for faults not ours. A necessary text, to understand the world of yesterday and, unfortunately, that of tomorrow. We had read it years ago, and reread it today, and we have come closer to its contents. A small book of just a few pages, but of unimaginable scope....
“FRIDAY RE-VERSO” “You don’t notice love, because it begins when it has already begun..“ If we had read this book at 17, we would have done so with anger and a yearning for revolution; today we read it with melancholy, but beneath the ashes, the revolution still blazes. What has De André always done if not tell us small stories, with little explanation, that prod dormant senses, like that of justice, of humility? Most...
“FRIDAY RE-VERSO” “‘I have always wanted to know something about you poets […] What do you do all day??“ Belfast and the 1990s. Two friends and a lot of bombs. Sarcasm and sweetness; so much anger; so much love. And a cat. We’re rereading this book after ten years: we didn’t remember it being so long, so full, and we did remember—yes, that—laughing a lot. What makes this novel so great? Because there’s grandeur in...
“When you are sad you need to feel your pain made into music.” Book of memoirs, in which the writer recounts her experience as a patient in a US psychiatric clinic in the late 1960s. A leap into the void crossed after a perhaps incorrect diagnosis of personality disorder, following an alleged attempt to commit suicide. The stay at the McLean private hospital will last for eighteen months, during which the writer lives in a...
“Few are the men who know how to go to death with dignity, and often not the ones you would expect.” We have lost count of the times we have read this book in our lifetime, yet it never seems enough to us. The first feeling we felt during and after reading is that of misunderstanding-anger. Thinking with a cold mind, it is difficult for us to conceive how inhumanity has reached such low peaks,...
“The anarchist Pinelli died, albeit in his own way, a natural death.” Challenging and intense book. The reading provides a strong knowledge of the history of Italy after World War II and the years of violent protest. A total immersion in the political, economic and social fractures that put the Italian state entity to a severe test. The initial preface helps the reader to orient himself in a world very distant from today, up to...
