When I am overwhelmed by awful
news about plagues, wars, ecological disasters, financial implosions, and the
rise of homegrown American fascism, I find it oddly comforting to learn about
earlier eras when everything was falling apart. That’s why – every few years – I
reread A Dream of Scipio.
The story takes place in a single
village in France, but at three different times when the End of the World was
nigh: the final days of the Roman Empire when the barbarians actually were at
the gate; the months of the medieval Black Death, when the whole world seemed
to be dying; and the years of the Nazi-occupation of France, when European
civilization was devolving into mechanized savagery.
This novel is about
finding a way to behave ethically in a time when doing so can get you killed.
Sometimes there is a price for being decent and kind and humane. A Dream of Scipio demands answers to age-old questions about history. How could this have happened? What would
I have done?
I
reread A Dream of Scipio when I need to brace myself for whatever comes next in
our own chaotic and unpredictable era of human history. Putting myself into the
minds of the characters in each of the three eras is a useful way to tell
myself “this, too, shall pass.” Life will go on. Maybe not the life I’d have
wished for, but... Life.
In national bestseller The Dream of Scipio, acclaimed author Iain Pears intertwines three intellectual mysteries, three love stories, and three of the darkest moments in human history. United by a classical text called "The Dream of Scipio," three men struggle to find refuge for their hearts and minds from the madness that surrounds them in the final days of the Roman Empire, in the grim years of the Black Death, and in the direst hours of World War II. An ALA Booklist Editors' Choice.
Iain Pears's An Instance of the Fingerpost and The Portrait are also available from Riverhead Books.
My
novel about World War II Italy depicts only one of the many times when the
peninsula was a battleground from the Alps to Sicily. This book is narrative
nonfiction that recounts medieval history with three extraordinary
personalities that came together in 1502: Leonardo DaVinci, Niccolo
Machiavelli, and Cesare Borgia.
Borgia
was the son of Pope Alexander VI, and in his brutal campaign to forge dozens of
warring states into a unified empire, he employed Leonardo to design and build
seige engines, while negotiating with Machiavelli for the freedom of Florence.
Borgia later became The Prince in Macchiavelli’s book on the realities of power
politics.
Again:
this book assures me that no matter how dark the tapestry history weaves for
us, there is always “a thread of grace.”
In the autumn of 1502 three giants of the Renaissance period - Cesare Borgia, Leonardo da Vinci and Niccolo Machiavelli - set out on one of the most treacherous military campaigns of the period. Cesare Borgia was a ferocious military leader whose name was synonymous with brutality and whose reputation was marred with the suspicion of incest. Niccolo Machiavelli was a witty and subversive intellectual, more suited to the silken diplomacy of royal courts than the sodden encampments of a military campaign. And Leonardo da Vinci was a visionary master and the most talented military engineer in Italy. What led…
The Periodic Table is by Primo
Levi, a chemist and one of the few thousand Italian Jews who were not
successfully hidden during World War II. If you are curious about the pre-war
culture of the Italkim (Italian Jews), this book is a window into a beautifully
rendered lost world.
Primo Levi was ultimately
imprisoned in Auschwitz, where he was sort of adopted by an illiterate Italian
peasant who was swept up in the forced labor sweeps. The two of them were
liberated and walked back to Italy together after the war.
What makes this book extraordinary
is the way Primo Levi teaches you a little chemistry with every chapter, as he
keeps his own sanity by finding a scientific worldview that is out of reach of
the brutality of the concentration camps.
An extraordinary kind of autobiography in which each of the 21 chapters takes its title and its starting-point from one of the elements in the periodic table. Mingling fact and fiction, science and personal record, history and anecdote, Levi uses his training as an industrial chemist and the terrible years he spent as a prisoner in Auschwitz to illuminate the human condition. Yet this exquisitely lucid text is also humourous and even witty in a way possible only to one who has looked into the abyss.
It is September 8, 1943. Fourteen-year-old Claudette Blum and her father are among thousands of Jewish refugees scrambling over the French Alps, hoping to find safety in Italy, which has just broken with Germany and made a separate peace with the Allies.
What no one realizes yet is that Italy has just become a Nazi-occupied country and will soon be a new battlefield in a brutal war. As the Blums race to stay one step ahead of the Nazis, they are aided by a vast underground network of Italian priests, nuns, and ordinary citizens. A Thread of Grace is based on the true story of Jewish survival in Italy during the last 20 months of World War II.
