Timber Afire, The

A quiet, leisurely, and moving account of Jewish life in Rome during World War II. . . . This is a memoir rather than a history, and the author writers with that lack of focus and richness of incident that most young lives contain: the intellectual pretensions and ambitions of his classmates, the anxieties brought by news of invasion or deportations, the simple traumas of adolescence, the strange beauty of Rome--all are portrayed with the same deliberation and seriousness. . . . [Della Seta] gives a novelistic quality to the story, profound in its pathos and depth. --Kirkus Reviews