Saving Primo

? Sandcastles in the Sun? is the first story in this series of four novellas featuring Julius '.J.D. ' Dickens and his partner Isaiah 'I-Hop' Hopkins. Dickens gets when his assistant, a 21-year-old first year law student, whose father, a police captain, is a close friend of J.D.'s, assures him that it's a simple ?open and shut case? paid for with department money. Now, Dickens has ?personal? reasons to take any case paid for with department money but soon finds that it's anything but and open and shut case. The Spearhead Case, ? ?A Heartbeat Away? and ?Saving Primo? are more of the same spine-tingling stories that will quickly interconnect with the one preceding it and keep the reading reading until the last page is turned.

A daring investigation of Primo Levi's brief career as a fighter with the Italian Resistance, and the grim secret that haunted his life No other Auschwitz survivor has been as literarily powerful and historically influential as Primo Levi. Yet Levi was not only a victim or a witness. In the fall of 1943, at the very start of the Italian Resistance, he was a fighter, participating in the first attempts to launch guerrilla warfare against occupying Nazi forces. Those three months have been largely overlooked by Levi's biographers; indeed, they went strikingly unmentioned by Levi himself. For the rest of his life he barely acknowledged that autumn in the Alps. But an obscure passage in Levi's The Periodic Table hints that his deportation to Auschwitz was linked directly to an incident from that time: "an ugly secret" that had made him give up the struggle, "extinguishing all will to resist, indeed to live." What did Levi mean by those dramatic lines? Using extensive archival research, Sergio Luzzatto's groundbreaking Primo Levi's Resistance reconstructs the events of 1943 in vivid detail. Just days before Levi was captured, Luzzatto shows, his group summarily executed two teenagers who had sought to join the partisans, deciding the boys were reckless and couldn't be trusted. The brutal episode has been shrouded in silence, but its repercussions would shape Levi's life. Combining investigative flair with profound empathy, Primo Levi's Resistance offers startling insight into the origins of the moral complexity that runs through the work of Primo Levi himself.

In a 1941 Nazi roundup of educated Poles, Stefan Budziaszek-newly graduated from medical school in Krakow-was incarcerated in the Krakow Montelupich Prison and transferred to the Auschwitz concentration camp in February 1942. German big businesses brutally exploited the cheap labor of prisoners in the camp, and workers were dying. In 1943, Stefan, now a functionary prisoner, was put in charge of the on-site prisoner hospital, which at the time was more like an infirmary staffed by well-connected but untrained prisoners. Stefan transformed this facility from just two barracks into a working hospital and outpatient facility that employed more than 40 prisoner doctors and served a population of 10,000 slave laborers. Stefan and his staff developed the hospital by commandeering medication, surgical equipment, and even building materials, often from the so-called Canada warehouse filled with the effects of Holocaust victims. But where does seeking the cooperation of the Nazi concentration camp staff become collusion with Nazi genocide? How did physicians deal with debilitated patients who faced "selection" for transfer to the gas chambers? Auschwitz was a cauldron of competing agendas. Unexpectedly, ideological rivalry among prisoners themselves manifested itself as well. Prominent Holocaust witnesses Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi both sought treatment at this prisoner hospital. They, other patients, and hospital staff bear witness to the agency of prisoner doctors in an environment better known for death than survival.

The Manly Art is another collection of writer Keith G. Laufenberg's short stories, only this time with the defining factor being that they all involve the sport of boxing. Having been in the sport himself, beginning at age 17, when he entered Marine Corps boot camp, and ending after seven years, fought as a professional, he is afforded a closer more intimate look into the boxers lives. In "Sonny Liston's Eyes," the reader is taken into the Underworld of the sport when a writer interviews an ex-mobster-who is dying of lung cancer-and claims to have killed Sonny Liston, as well as JFK and Martin Luthur King Jr. He tells an incredible story but backs it up by saying he has absolutely verifiable evidence that he will produce for the writer. In "Frankenstein" we see why a young amateur boxer should have picked boxing over football. He has little say in the matter though as his father and uncle have trained him his entire life for football and it, along with the other stories, will keep you glued to the page.

The Anxious Assassins is another attempt at finally finding out the truth of what happened on November 22, 1963 in Dallas, Texas. In a 2003 interview, Robert Blakey, the Chief Counsel of the HSCA issued a statement on the CIA: "...I no longer believe that we were able to conduct an appropriate investigation of the CIA and its relationship to Oswald.... We now know that the Agency withheld from the Warren Commission the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro. Had the commission known of the plots, it would have followed a different path in its investigation. The Agency unilaterally deprived the commission of a chance to obtain the full truth, which will now never be known. Significantly, the Warren Commission's conclusion that the agencies of the government co-operated with it is, in retrospect, not the truth. The Agency's process could only have been designed to frustrate the ability of the committee in 1976-1979.If you want the real story you'll have to read "The Anxious Assassins."

Plays

Bad Medicine is another collection of short stories by writer Keith G. Laufenberg that brings the reality of life in America-that of a nation where virtually everything, including health care, is available for profit only and must be bought & paid for-before delivery. Every working and non-working American-disabled, either by sickness or poverty-has lived through this and, to this very day, in 2014, continue to live through it. These stories graphically illustrate why it is the Capitalist System itself that harbors institutions that lie, rob, cheat and steal and all in the name of the very God that they all worship-profit! It shows why they-the the doctors, lawyers, politicians and insurance companies-have a strangle hold on America which can only end in the country experiencing a depression a bankruptcy-or both-or a revolution. These stories will keep you reading long into the day or night as you root for the underdog, even though you know he may not ""win,"" this time around.

In his final book before his death, Primo Levi returns once more to his time at Auschwitz in a moving meditation on memory, resiliency, and the struggle to comprehend unimaginable tragedy. Drawing on history, philosophy, and his own personal experiences, Levi asks if we have already begun to forget about the Holocaust. His last book before his death, Levi returns to the subject that would define his reputation as a writer and a witness. Levi breaks his book into eight essays, ranging from topics like the unreliability of memory to how violence twists both the victim and the victimizer. He shares how difficult it is for him to tell his experiences with his children and friends. He also debunks the myth that most of the Germans were in the dark about the Final Solution or that Jews never attempted to escape the camps. As the Holocaust recedes into the past and fewer and fewer survivors are left to tell their stories, The Drowned and the Saved is a vital first-person testament. Along with Elie Wiesel and Hannah Arendt, Primo Levi is remembered as one of the most powerful and perceptive writers on the Holocaust and the Jewish experience during World War II. This is an essential book both for students and literary readers. Reading Primo Levi is a lesson in the resiliency of the human spirit.