“There were people in danger of their lives, and we took action. Full stop.”
A breaking news, known by many people, told in the form of a novel. A hero of our days who, listening only to his conscience, has put into play everything he had built in life to work to save lives. This is the story of Cristian, an engineer, who in the midst of the 2020 pandemic, creates a valve that applied to a snorkeling mask will save the lives of SARS-CoV-2 patients in many Italian hospitals, and subsequently putting the his invention available to everyone through the internet, in many hospitals around the world, from Brazil to Vietnam.
Fear, altruism, hope and success chase each other in the pages of the book, making the reader an integral part of the story.
We like to say that we were lucky to have met the two authors during our summer festival “BooktoMi Station 2021” and to have talked to them before, during and after the event without any kind of barrier and in total sincerity. This allows us to testify to their extraordinary degree of humanity and altruism which, inevitably, transpires only in part in the pages of the story. This is especially true of Cristian Fracassi, a simple boy, with the weaknesses of a normal man, but the willpower and sense of duty of a thousand men.
The writing is simple and straightforward, no detail to underline from a stylistic point of view, but this is not the purpose of the book. In our opinion, this text should be adopted in schools for civic education. We are sure that after reading it the children will be more sensitive to the obligations of living in a community. To work for the common good, even when it would be easier not to do it, to think of one’s own small garden, but to have that sense of greater duty for which the good of the community becomes more important than the good of the individual. This is the most important testimony that the two authors have left us.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Cristian Fracassi, Federico Vincenzi, In one breath, Hoepli, Milano, 2020
