“An urgent, wrenching dispatch from the frontline of the defining crisis of our times. 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

“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

“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