"Fun and tragic, emotional and entertaining. With cutting intelligence and the wisdom acquired with age, Aversa sews together memories and experiences about the power of forgiveness, love and adversity."-Self-Publishing Review
"A fast-paced, intense, and colorful read detailing transformative adventures and experiences. The larger-than-life narrative is punctuated with mother-son dialogue that's penetrating, satirical, and at times provides comic relief to the serious tone."-BlueInk Review
Two lives. Two devastating diagnoses. One unbreakable bond.
She was given weeks to live; he was told he would go blind at any moment.
This is the true story of a resilient mother, her rebel son, and the extraordinary tenacity required to face down life's ultimate giants.
Benedetta Aversa was a woman of quiet defiance. A traditional Italian matriarch devoted to her family and generous with her community, she refused to let circumstance define her. At age forty-four, with a failing stomach, a withering pancreas, and a threatened liver, she walked back into a classroom to finish the high school diploma she had to abandon decades earlier. She carried that unbreakable will into everything she did-including raising her rebellious, sometimes reckless son, Domenic.
Domenic would eventually carry that same stubborn courage onto the global stage, building businesses in the lawless underbelly of 1990s post-Soviet Russia and later stepping into corporate crises where companies, jobs, and entire communities were at risk.
Then, in 2001, the crisis became personal. At fifty-five, Benedetta was struck by a sudden medical catastrophe and told she had only weeks to live. She calmly asked for her medical charts and declared, "My son will know what to do."
Domenic was hundreds of miles away, but he was not going to fail his mom. Racing against a ticking clock, he carried her virtually lifeless body into an Ohio hospital, beginning a brutal, decades-long medical odyssey that would see Benedetta survive five separate comas.
Three years into his mother's fight, the unimaginable would happen-again. At thirty-four, Domenic was diagnosed with a volatile eye disease and told he could lose his sight entirely. For the next twelve years, while legally blind and often operating in near-total darkness, he continued traveling the world and stepping into crises-fighting for the survival of strangers while drawing on his mother's courage to keep his own footing in the dark.
"We knew that Goliath could and would show up at any moment in any form. Rather than run from adversity, we decided to develop a relationship with it. We thanked Goliath and made him noble because without that adversity, we wouldn't have known what was inside of us. As Goliath grew, we grew."
Thank Goliath chronicles two extraordinary lives bound together by love, conflict, sacrifice, and an almost unbelievable determination to survive. Blending Italian wit, international adventure, medical drama, and hard-won wisdom, it is a moving testament to the discovery that the giants we spend our lives trying to defeat may be the very forces that reveal who we are.
