Started out pretty good. Last half not so good.

This was the most painful book I've read in a very long time. The scene where Woody confronts his daughter's killer in prison had me fighting back the tears. Lessons in how we grieve and then build a new life on the ashes of the past are difficult to endure. A sobering journey that makes you feel extraordinarily lucky to have a "normal" life.

Read this many years ago and enjoyed it.

I went over to my parents' house today and my mom practically forced this on me. But she also baked an incredibly delicious plum crisp, so that's okay.

This Hellenga book is set in Bologna. It is about an american father who loses his daughter in the terrorist bombing of the Bologna train station in 1980. He is a professor in a small midwestern college who's life is in chaos anyway. He comes to Italy for the trial.this is the beginning of his psychological journey.

It has been a long time since I read this book but I remember enjoying the sense of place. A few years later, I was myself in the Bologna train station and happened upon the monument commemorating those who died in the bombing. The crater from the bomb was retained in one of the waiting rooms. The hole in the wall was glazed so you could see this also from the platform. All the names of those who died were listed. The monument is very moving, more so because it remains part of the comings and goings of the train station, reminding us how precarious our existence is.

Classics professor sounds the depths of loss and new life. Not great literature but an entertaining and meaningful read.

Sadly, this is a very timely novel about a mid-western family forced to cope with the death of their daughter/sister killed in a terrorist attack at the Bologna train station. Alan Woodhull is a classics professor at a small liberal arts college in Illinois. After learning of his daughter's, Cookie's, death, he his wife and daughters start on personal odysseys to come to terms with her passing and find meaning in their lives. This novel could serve as a tribute to all those families suffering losses from terrorist attacks all over the world.

DNF. I'm so sad, because I really liked the first chapter of this book, and was ready for a novel about stories, life, family, and grief. Instead, once the perspective switched to Woody (the prologue is from the point of view of his daughter Sara), the book became about a creepy, sad, pretentious,, 50 year old professor who thinks about nothing but sex. Yes, even about his students. Even about his dead daughter. AT HER MEMORIAL SERVICE. Creepy and gross, had to stop.

A complex study of a man's journey to accepting (and coming to terms with) his daughter's death in a terrorist bombing. Greek classicism mixes with American blues songs to inform the protagonist's thinking--he's a brainy and diverse guy, and also manages to score with almost every woman he meets (a very unblinking, guitless approach to sex is a continual theme). You know where this is going but the path it takes to get there is fascinating.

I'm pretty sure I read this because it was reccomended reading before going to Bologna... but I wouldn't reccomend it for that...

This was a timely but difficult book dealing, as it does, with the death of a young woman at the hands of terrorists. But the book is so well written that it was hard to put down and constantly made me feel like I was learning and growing from it. It is the story of a father's attempts to recapture his life seven years after his daughter was killed by a random bombing in a train station in Italy. The author is enviably proficient in the classics, in language and customs and in cooking. It was a joy to read Hellenga's story and I definitely recommend it.

"Death, in fact, is a condition of meaning. Without it human beings, like the Greek gods, would make no significant choices, confront no limitations."

One of the best books I've ver read.Very literary, clever, deep, extraordinarily well written.

Quite melancholic, about the death of the eldest daughter in a family and the chaos that ensues. Writing evokes the feeling of a great tragedu befalling a family and how they each cope, or don't. No happy endings here, but more how to face the difficulties that we will all be handed.

Sort of travel literature. One character works at a science museum, another goes to Italy and learns to make great salad dressing (a lttle bonus).