This collection of essays depicts the early post-WWII career of Ginzburg. The topics span the gamut, from life in Abruzzi living on the run from the fascists to the variety and quality of food in post-war London. Her title essay perhaps best combines her elegant writing style, her wit, her eye for detail, her perceptiveness about human nature, and her passion for life. She advises, “as far as the education of children is concerned I think they should be taught not the little virtues but the great ones. Not thrift but generosity and an indifference to money; not caution but courage and a contempt of danger; not shrewdness but frankness and a love of truth; not tact but love for one’s neighbour and self-denial; not a desire for success but a desire to be and to know. Usually we do just the opposite; we rush to teach them a respect for the little virtues, on which we build our whole system of education. In doing this we are choosing the easiest way, because the little virtues do not involve any actual dangers, indeed they provide shelter from Fortune’s blows.” She has been described as a writer’s writer and the one thing that sustained her through her time in hiding, through her husband’s execution at the hand of the Nazis, and through raising her three children after the war was her vocation. For Ginzburg, it was not a career choice, but her only passion. “I love and understand one thing in the world and that is poetry.”
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