Gio'

Obviously, this is a very famous book but, to be honest, I found it long winded and over-long and I was exhausted but the endless dialogues and monologues that I didn't thoroughly enjoy the good parts when I finally got there, and there are plenty of good parts.

Can I give 10 stars to a book? As a sucker for good style, I'm amazed at how clean and beautiful the language of this book is (I read it in Italian, so I cannot say how good the other translations are). I love when a book is able to marry great content with innovative structure to generate a timeless exercise of style. As a technology guy (not a chemist) I'm fascinated by how unapologetically geeky Primo Levi gets into this book, while transmitting a never boring enthusiasm for his work. As a person who has already read “If this is a man” I marvel at the fact that a single person was able to write two masterpieces in his lifetime and that they are so different from each other. One of the most original pieces of art I came across. Primo Levi is now up there with my other heroes and he makes me feel proud to have been born in the same country as him.

The story grew into me slowly. For a while I thought it was just ok, and well written for sure. But over time, I couldn't resist in getting fascinated by the strength of the main character and the strength of the youth. A lot of things to unpack from this book, I'll leave to the academics to talk about it, I'm just saying that this book is profound but still fun and enjoyable, reading it is absolutely not a chore and it won't make you feel bad, just a little more aware of the world.

Beautiful book. The story is original and allows exploring many aspects of young life in a difficult environment. The author has a gift in being able to make you understand the deep personality of each character in just a few lines. The main problem with this book is that it is way too short and it stops in the middle of the story. I understand that there's is no need to continue the story forever, but in this case I believe that the story has been cut excessively short.

I had a little bit of trepidation in staying this book. I didn't know what to expect and, as an American, in this historic moment I'm not in the mood for more American testosterone celebration. Luckily this book is a lyric masterpiece that expresses many thing about we and life that are deeply personal without pride or ego. The style of writing is superb and original with great rythm. I listened to the audiobook that in to of everything has a fantastic reading performance by Bryan Cranston

This is a quick and easy read. I don't think I disagree with almost anything in the book, and it is always good to hear ideas that are not necessarily new but expressed in clear and engaging form. Not life changing for me but a decent book, nonetheless.

The story is of course epic and full of nuances. I was impressed of how dense it is. Definitely there are no wasted pages or long stretches in which nothing happens. Things move fast through history, family ties, social issues and magic spirituality. I'm not sure I can add much to what has already been said about this incredible book.
I felt ambitious and listened to the audiobook in Spanish. That was a great exercise for my Spanish Language study, but maybe I missed out a little bit because my Spanish is not that good yet. On the other end, maybe I would have missed out something else by listening to/reading a translation...

I'm not even sure how to describe this book. It is at the same time a love letter to comics, a sad story about WW2, an epic about the life of very singular and intense characters, a story about family values and relationships and do much more.
The book is big and you need to take your time with it. A lot of work has gone in this book to create such an exciting universe, so will depicted in vivid details.
It is rare to encounter such a complete masterpiece that is also extremely polished and easy to consume, because among other things this book is a lesson of writing style.

Great, great, great! The book is fun, quick paced and certainly deserves all the notoriety it has. Maybe some of the characters are a bit shallow, in the sense that some of their actions are not necessarily justified by the personality that they were built with...

Why do I do this to myself, why? Why do I read books that are so hard to cope with? This book is infuriating, I want to have a magic wand to erase a large part of world history. I cannot rationally accept that something like slavery ever existed but the history is what it is and history doesn't care that I'm so upset about it. Sadly, slavery doesn't exist anymore, but I see racism alive and well every single day.
If I'm able for a moment to judge the book for its literary merits, I think it is well written, with clear and engaging language and a nice way to handle timelines and multiple characters. It also paints this magical world of the underground railroad as momentary relief from the horror of real life. There are plenty of point of views and plenty of histories to highlight the many different backgrounds of the many type of people involved in that part of American History.

This book has three fundamental parts, plus, in the version I listened to an essay from the author written a few years after the first publication. The first part is very good and engaging, the middle part is a little overlong and boring and I also found the some of the characters were on the shallow side with some of their actions and reactions not fully consistent with the personality they were described with. The third part is back to be tight and exciting and very well written. The final essay is just brilliant.

Brilliant brilliant book. I'm not a mountain man and I wasn't born in the mountains, but my wife was and some of the vivid imagery of this book captures perfectly some of the things that she told me over the years about people that grow up at high altitudes.
This author is so talented and I hope that he will be able to continue producing books this strong.

Overall this classifies in the immense genre of “journey”, but the approach is fresh, the locations unlikely and the story multifaceted. I think it as enough novelty to a base story that he been told many times already. The audiobook version is very good.

This is well written story. What I liked is that “Sofia” is not always at the center of action or focus, but it is an excuse to put together different characters with different stories in a non obvious master plan.

This is an extremely original story. The amount of research that must have gone into it is probably incredible. The story is just cute, not particularly deep and only some of the characters are well developed, while others are pretty shallow and their actions don't really seem well motivated.

This story is beautiful and sad. It describes so many details about some of the tribal traditions in such great details that I could vividly imagine the characters. The story is also said because there is no winner and definitely at any moment, the strongest abuses the weaker. Sometimes the weaker is a woman, a child and some other times the weaker is who was before the strongest and mighty. Can we finally be better at some point? Can we both respect human rights and traditions at the same time?

Cool book. The culture of old Sicilian noble family is really fascination and Dacia Maraini goes through the live of her character giving us lots and lots of details and transport us in that period of posturing and the cult of coming from an "old" family.

Good thriller, well written and with an original enough plot to keep you surprised, without excessively convoluted plot twist. It is a 4.5 stars book for me.

The book is very interesting and exquisitely written. The character depth is impressive and the psychological insights very moving. Only 4 starts because the story itself is phoned in and you can already guess how it is going to end after one third of the book. The story is mostly a pretext to elaborate on the main themes.

Merged review:

The book is very interesting and exquisitely written. The character depth is impressive and the psychological insights very moving. Only 4 starts because the story itself is phoned in and you can already guess how it is going to end after one third of the book. The story is mostly a pretext to elaborate on the main themes.

As Italian, I found pleasure in all the Italian locations of this book. Apart from this aspect, the book flows by pretty quick, it is romantic and well written and describes some human aspects of the war in a skillful way. I enjoyed it but I did not find it memorable.

The book is pretty bland. Amateurish theories of educations and relationships between mothers and daughters. Nothing special really...

Maybe there's a good book buried in this beast. The issue is that the good parts are drowned into endless boring parts that drove me crazy. If I'm able for a moment to redact all the useless parts, the book is sweet and nice and describe some interesting communities and some part of the American history I knew very little about.

I read this just after Blink and I found this book much stronger. Blink was a cute and entertaining exercise, but the message and cases in this book are truly inspiring and well written. Recommended.

Exciting! I was pretty worried because the beginning of the book was not as good as the previous two, with too much of the usual fare of conspiracies. But I was once again surprised buy how the rhythm of the story mounted and mounted, with great old and new characters and by the end I could not stop and I lost good hours of sleep trying to get a few more page in. It is bittersweet to finish this amazing trilogy from a gifted author gone too soon...

This is a fun and light read. The author brings a lot of interesting cases that sparkled several conversation inside my head. Would it withstand a harsh peer review? Probably not, but who cares. The author just wants to inform you and make you think, not to shove some truth down your throat. Enjoy this book without thinking too much about it. The most interesting concepts will stay with you and make you a tiny bit more aware of what's going on around you.