Tears of Salt: A Doctor's Story

by Pietro Bartolo, Lidia Tilotta

Overview

The internationally best-selling personal story of "the doctor on the front lines of the migrant crisis" (CNN).

Situated more than one hundred miles off Italy’s southern coast, the rocky island of Lampedusa has hit world headlines in recent years as the first port of call for hundreds of thousands of African and Middle Eastern refugees fleeing civil war and terrorism and hoping to make a new life in Europe. Dr. Pietro Bartolo, who runs the lone medical clinic on the island, has been caring for many of them—both the living and the dead—for a quarter century.

Tears of Salt is Dr. Bartolo’s moving account of his life and work set against one of the signal crises of our time. With quiet dignity and an unshakable moral center, he tells unforgettable tales of pain and hope, stories of those who didn’t make it and those who did. Tears of Salt is a lasting work of literature and an intimate portrait of a remarkable man whose inspiring message rings clear: "We can’t and we won’t be governed by our fears."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393651287
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	01/09/2018
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Pietro Bartolo was born in Lampedusa to a family of fishermen. He returned to Lampedusa after getting his medical degree, and has been running the island’s lone clinic since 1991. He was featured in Gianfranco Rosi’s celebrated documentary film Fire at Sea, a finalist for the Academy Award.

Lidia Tilotta is a journalist with RAI Regional News and Mediterraneo.

Table of Contents

Mare nostrum 13

One red shoe 18

There is no getting used to it 22

Women on the way 25

The wounds you cannot see 30

Drawing lots 39

An irrevocable choice 45

The girl in the front row 52

Risky investments 57

A Fèrra 63

Back to the island 67

Little pieces of home 74

Omar is unstoppable 81

The will of the waves 86

The greatest gift 91

Faduma and Jerusalem 94

Young Anuar's wisdom 101

A blessing from heaven 105

Giacomo's path 109

Arms of giants 114

God is not to blame 118

The lengths they will go to 121

When a mayor understands what world leaders cannot 126

L'erba tinta un mori mai 130

The off-season tourist 139

Never shall I forget 150

The boat cemetery 157

You brought this upon yourself 161

Favor with the media 166

Lampedusa 179

October 3, 2013 185

Children of the same sea 196

Acknowledgments 201

Letters Pietro Bartolo 204

Editorial Reviews

Tears of Salt…manages to tell the story of one of the most devastating and complicated crises of our time while humanizing every person we meet…Bartolo's observations about the human condition have very little to do with medicine as a technical trade and everything to do with what it means to provide care for people regardless of station or story. Bartolo captures a truth that seems to escape most physicians who pick up the pen: Being a doctor doesn't actually privilege one with access to the core of the human experience; it's being human that does.

The New York Times Book Review - Uzodinma Iweala

11/13/2017
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.” (Jan)

Publishers Weekly

"Heart-wrenching and relevant."

Minneapolis StarTribune - Marion Winik

"Tears of Salt is a tender personal memoir of a fisherman’s son turned doctor on the rocky island of Lampedusa, where Dr. Bartolo is at once the savior and the coroner to boatload after boatload of migrants who risk everything to cross the deadly seas. It is also a damning indictment of the broader, collective indifference of humankind to both the drowned and the saved."

Philip Gourevitch

"Through Dr. Bartolo we understand that it is impossible to do nothing in the face of such great human need."

Vanity Fair

"Tears of Salt tells the story of people who flee war or poverty in Africa or Asia, survive lethal months and years of travel, then cross the Mediterranean to become the ‘refugees’ we see in the news briefly—if at all. Dr. Bartolo tells us about rescuing everyone he can, burying those he cannot, and saving their stories as if they were his own. This is a personal, urgent, and universal book."

Gloria Steinem

"Dr. Bartolo’s spare, poignant, angry account of his life as doctor to the refugees arriving on the shores of Italy is an unusual and important addition to the growing literature of migration. Anyone wanting to understand the disaster of what is happening around us should read this book."

Caroline Moorehead

"At a time when our broken world seems to be encouraging, and lauding, the worst of humanity, along comes the remarkable Dr. Bartolo to show us what courage, integrity, and compassion look like. His life is a manual of what it means to be human."

Rabih Alameddine

08/01/2017
Born into a family of fishermen, Bartolo has run the only medical clinic on the Italian island of Lampedusa for 25 years, tending to his fellow islanders while also helping to rescue and care for the hundreds of thousands of desperate migrants from the Middle East and Africa who have landed there. And if that story sounds familiar, it's because Bartolo is the beating heart at the center of the Academy Award-nominated documentary Fire at Sea. An international best seller, already translated into 13 languages.

Library Journal

2017-09-24
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.

Kirkus Reviews