Tears of Salt

October 15, 2017
On a remote island between Italy and Africa, a doctor does everything he can to deal with the health crises of refugees. As the director of the only medical clinic on Lampedusa, Bartolo has seen it all. He has dealt with shipwrecks where corpses wash ashore; women pregnant from rape; babies separated from their mothers; teenagers who have no idea what their next step might be but know that they cannot return to the hell their homeland has become; and others so shaken by the trials of their exodus that they want nothing but to go back home. The doctor has seen refugees who have sold their kidneys or had other organs harvested to afford the exorbitant price of their escape. "This book is an eyewitness account, put down on paper, just as it is, black and white, without filters or embellishment," writes co-author Tilotta. Interspersed with vignettes of tragedy and occasional hope is the doctor's own story, how the son of island fishermen returned home with a wife and a medical degree and how he has needed to be all things to all people in the decades since. "Sometimes," writes Bartolo, "when I am the only friendly face in front of them, patients feel as if I am no longer their doctor, but a saviour who can give them back their loved ones and reunite their families." The author has even attempted to adopt a couple of the refugees, but perhaps his main role is as the conscience of this crisis (he was the main figure in the award-winning documentary Fire at Sea). After meeting the pope, Bartolo reflected how the two shared the understanding that "we are surrounded by invisible walls without doors, that we are fighting a hopeless battle against those who want to rid themselves of the problem by simply ignoring it." Though the chronological hopscotch makes it more like a scrapbook collection of memories than a cohesive narrative, there is great hope and poignancy here.

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November 13, 2017
In this moving account of attending to victims of war, Italian physician Bartolo makes an impassioned plea for more public awareness of and effective humanitarian solutions for refugees from Africa and the Middle East. Practicing on the Mediterranean island of Lampedusa, Bartolo compares his life to those of the refugee men, women, and children who arrive on the island by boat, many of whom he treats (his clinic is the only one on the island). Bartolo, writing with Italian journalist Tilotta, doesn’t shy away from discussing the toughest of situations and gives voice to the many nameless refugees who, in their native countries, were victims of racism, rape, sex trafficking, illegal organ harvesting, and sexual dismemberment; he also tells the stories of many others, whose bodies were found in boat holds or floating off shore. Bartolo writes: “You can wear all the protective gear you like, but you cannot protect your soul. This is war.” Equating the refugee crisis with the Holocaust, he has written a powerful condemnation of public inertia to foreign tragedies that brings home a truly arresting “chronicle of suffering.”

January 1, 2018
Admirers of the refugee-crisis documentary Fire at Sea, shot by Italian filmmaker Gianfranco Rosi on the Sicilian island of Lampedusa and nominated for a 2016 Academy Award, will now learn more about heroic local doctor Bartolo. In his memoir, written with the help of journalist Tilotta, he explains that migrants from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East travel by boat to his homeland to escape war, torture, and terror. Throughout his story of rescues and deaths (including 368 body bags on October 3, 2013), Bartolo makes it clear that he loves Lampedusa and the desperate people who flee their homes to reach it. He tells stories of howto get admitted to the hospital in Sicily rather than getting sent to prison in Tunisiamigrants ingest things like rusty nails and even razor blades. He shares his compassion for them as they arrive at this small piece of the earth's crust that broke off from Africa and drifted toward Europe . . . a symbolic gateway between the two continents. As the refugee crisis continues, Bartolo's tale is timely and important.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)