It plunges you into the reckless, dangerous world of the Santangelo crime family. It introduces you to Gino Santangelo, the street kid who makes it all the way to the top. And then brings you Lucky—his sensual, stunningly beautiful, and passionate daughter; a woman who dares to win her father’s empire for herself; a woman unafraid of taking…CHANCES.

    When he arrives, he finds her shaken but surviving; it is his father, left alone, who is unable to cope, who begins to fail, to slip away from life. Joined by his nineteen-year-old son, John suddenly becomes enmeshed in the frightening, consuming, endless minutiae of caring for a beloved, dying parent. He also finds himself inescapably confronting his own middle age, jammed between his son's feckless impatience to get on with his life and his father's heartbreaking willingness to let go. A story of the love that binds generations, Dad celebrates the universe of possibilities within every individual life.

    Far from wealthy they are still reasonably content with their life until one night when their teenage daughter helps a wealthy and lonely Wall Street lawyer. Out of gratitude the lawyer showers the family with gifts and money. The Strands find their lives altered and not necessarily for the best.

    She and her family, including an illiterate, abusive, alcoholic but resourceful father, rescued and sheltered scores of them. In a childlike style that reflects the excitement of those dramatic, danger-filled days, she relives the emotions of the irrepressible and plucky young heroine as she and her mother nursed the wounded and comforted the dying, both American and German, while her father salvaged precious stores from the water. Duboscq, severely injured and disfigured in a land-mine explosion that killed her brother, credits surviving five years of surgical procedures, and the tribulations of later life, in part to the inspiration she derived from the suffering and bravery of the soldiers she met during this childhood experience, an act of courage for which she was awarded France's Legion of Honor.

    After many years Ficowski takes up the issue of the crime committed on the Jewish people, particularly emphasizing the need for compassion, the ethical precept of perpetuating the sufferings, the issues of faithful memories, and the protest against lies and against the deliberate concealment of the tragedy. In A Reading of Ashes the author tries to reconcile three different approaches to the problem: the authentic documents in the form of excerpts from books quoted in extenso, voices, and testimonies, the personal experience taking the form of lyrical tales, and the rich language of images, metaphors, and rhetoric figures. Very moving is the force of the facts that cannot be replaced with a poetic comment. The impression of veracity is achieved through the exposed connection between the childhood biography and the Holocaust history. On the other hand, the high quality art of poetry does not serve the purpose of presenting artistic proficiency. It precisely expresses the truth, reveals inhuman cruelty, diversifies the spectrum of psychical perceptions, and, through a number of literary and cultural references, gives universal significance to the described facts.

    Its wide appeal is obvious.Included are 200 selections by 90 Canadian and American writers, from foundry workers and short-order cooks to the likes of Joyce Carol Oates, Patrick Lane, Pier Giorgio di Cicco and Wayman himself.