The Parnas

By Silvano Arieti

Book Overview

"The psychiatrist's insight and the storyteller's skill offer an absorbing tale."--Elie Wiesel"A book to read again and again with the same piety with which it has been written. A rare event in... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0465054528
• ISBN13: 9780465054527
• Release Date: October 1979
• Publisher: Basic Books
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 1.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.6" x 5.5" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

Excellent book!

Insightful,analytical and comprehensive portrait of a loving character.Is a masterpiece. Full of drama,but it was a real life drama.The "parnas" was a sensitive man struggling with his own imaginative fears but valiantly facing the real fear.

A Book to Reckon With

Pisa, Italy. July, 1944. As the Nazis and Allies collide, Giuseppe Pardo Roques, lay leader of Pisa's Jewish community, is a refugee in his own home. Struggling to display strength in spite of a bizarre and debilitating neurosis, the cultured, learned and generous Pardo plays host to several others, Jews and Christians both, seeking shelter from the battle. The Parnas reconstructs Pardo's final days and his ultimate confrontation with the Nazis. At once memoir (the author knew the characters), psychological profile, and meditation on good and evil, the book's defining quality is compassion. I'll read it again.

Psychiatric Insight and Storyteller's Gift

This is an incredible story.Silvano Arieti was an extremely gifted, and very well known, psychiatrist. He was born in Pisa, Italy and, as a child, looked to The Parnas--or synagogue leader, Giuseppe Pardo Roques--as a mentor. The Parnas was mentally ill. His illness inspired Arieti's career--which, as it developed, convinced Arieti all the more that "mental illness may...espress the nobility of man."Arieti dreamed he would one day cure The Parnas, but The Parnas was murdered by the Nazis in WWII. Decades later, Arieti recreates the last days of The Parnas, providing us with a moving potrait of an incredible man in terrible times. While Arieti's conclusions are profound, this book is definately accessible to the high school reader.