White on Black
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
He is a Russian with a Spanish name. A child of the foreign exchange students was born in Moscow and diagnosed with severe cerebral palsy. The Soviet officials told his mother that he died, and took him away to the worst place imaginable. Without the use of his hands and feet, he endured through the Soviet orphanage system. He was scheduled to die at the age of 15. However, the boy survived. He escaped. He lives.
If you like to read about pink flowers, good fortune, and pleasant people, this book is not for you. This story is about pain, sorrow, and horror of near death. This book is also an extraordinary personal testament, the story of one boy’s triumph in the face of impossible obstacles. What does not kill you will make you stronger. This book can make you stronger. That is if you have enough courage to read it from the beginning to the end.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
To be a crippled orphan anywhere is a sad thing; worst, undoubtedly, in the Third World, but no picnic in the Soviet Union. Gallego, a brilliant boy born with cerebral palsy, with hands and feet so twisted that though he could crawl he could use only his left index finger, was abandoned to state institutions by his grandfather in the 1960s. That he survived this "cruel and terrible" childhood is a tribute to a remarkably strong will. The most atrocious fact of many that readers learn is that eventually, usually at age 15, institutionalized boys, Gallego included, were transferred from children's wards to the "old folks' home," where they lay in their own urine until they died; in one month, seven out of eight perished. Amazingly, Gallego lived to marry, have children and write this extraordinary book of "stories," spare, elliptical, often fierce vignettes centered around remembered figures and events: "a bite of lard, a salami sandwich, a handful of figs, a blue sky, a couple of books, and a kind word." These glimpses of adversity and triumph are quirky, sometimes appalling, often funny and touching without being sentimental. The book won the 2003 Russian Booker Prize and should receive similar acclaim here.
