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Were You Always an Italian?: Ancestors and Other Icons of Italian America

Author: Maria Laurino

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

ISBN: 0393343510

Category: Social Science

Page: 224

View: 8009

"One of the best books about the immigrant experience in America....unique and gracefully written."—San Francisco Chronicle Maria Laurino sifts through the stereotypes bedeviling Italian Americans to deliver a penetrating and hilarious examination of third-generation ethnic identity. With "intelligence and honesty" (Arizona Republic), she writes about guidos, bimbettes, and mammoni (mama's boys in Italy); examines the clashing aesthetics of Giorgio Armani and Gianni Versace; and unravels the etymology of southern Italian dialect words like gavone and bubidabetz. According to Frances Mayes, she navigates the conflicting forces of ethnicity "with humor and wisdom."
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Leaving Little Italy

Essaying Italian American Culture

Author: Fred L. Gardaphe

Publisher: SUNY Press

ISBN: 0791485978

Category: Literary Criticism

Page: 215

View: 6676

Provides an overview of the past, present, and future of Italian American culture.
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Vertigo

A Memoir

Author: Louise DeSalvo

Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY

ISBN: 1558617779

Category: Biography & Autobiography

Page: 304

View: 7646

Born to immigrant parents during World War II and coming of age during the 1950s, DeSalvo finds herself rebelling against a script written by parental and societal expectations. In her revealing family memoir, DeSalvo sifts through painful memories to give voice to all that remained unspoken and unresolved in her life: a mother's psychotic depression, a father's rage and violent rigidity, a sister's early depression and eventual suicide, and emerging memories of childhood incest. At times humorous and often brutally candid, DeSalvo also delves through the more recent conflicts posed by marriage, motherhood, and the crisis that started her on the path of her life's work: becoming a writer in order to excavate the meaning of her life and community. In Vertigo, Louise DeSalvo paints a striking picture of the easy freedom of the husband and fatherless world of working-class Hoboken, New Jersey, the neighborhood of her early childhood, where mothers and children had an unaccustomed say in the running of their lives while men were off defending their country, but were jolted back into submission when World War II ended. Hoboken was not a place where girls were encouraged to develop their minds, or their independent spirits, yet it is that tenement-dotted city with its pulse and energy, wonderful Italian pastry, and sidewalk roller-skating contests, and not suburban Ridgefield, where the family moves when Louise is seven, that claims Louise’s heart. Written with an honesty that is as rare as it is unsettling, Vertigo also speaks to broader truths about the impact of ethnicity, class, and gender in American life. Offering inspiration and a healthy dose of subversion, this personal story of a writer’s life is also a study of the alchemy between lived experience and creativity, and the life-transforming possibilities of this process.
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F & L Primo

Author: N.A

Publisher: N.A

ISBN: N.A

Category: Italian Americans

Page: N.A

View: 2380

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Don't Tell Mama!

The Penguin Book of Italian American Writing

Author: Regina Barreca

Publisher: Penguin Group USA

ISBN: N.A

Category: Fiction

Page: 545

View: 1239

Representing the best Italian-American contributions to American literature, this comprehensive anthology of fiction, poetry, journalism, and essays ranges from the 1800s to the present day and includes both classic works and previously unpublished pieces from Don DeLillo, Mario Puzo, Gay Talese, Louise DeSalvo, and others. Original.
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Our Roots are Deep with Passion

Creative Nonfiction Collects New Essays by Italian American Writers

Author: Lee Gutkind,Joanna Clapps Herman

Publisher: Other PressLlc

ISBN: 9781590512425

Category: Literary Collections

Page: 286

View: 5131

Thoughtful, poignant, and hilarious personal essays collected by the editors of Creative Nonfiction explore the meanings of Italian-American identity. In the twenty-one nonfiction narratives collected in Our Roots Are Deep with Passion, established and emerging writers with family ties to Italy reflect on the ways that their lives have been accented with uniquely Italian-American flavors. Several of the essays breathe new life into the time-honored theme of family—Louise DeSalvo honors her grandfather, nick-named “the drunk” because he spent his life of hard work drinking wine instead of water, and James Vescovi portrays the close of the stormy relationship between his father and grandmother. Other stories tackle the mystical side of Italian-American life, like Laura Valeri’s account of a summer vacation séance in Sardinia that goes eerily awry. And elsewhere, Stephanie Susnjara charts the history of garlic in society and her kitchen, and Gina Barreca offers an unabashed confession of congenital jealousy. Lee Gutkind, founding editor of Creative Nonfiction, the nation’s premier nonfiction prose literary journal, and Joanna Clapps Herman have brought together artful essays by novelists, scholars, critics, and memoirists from across the country. The pieces are as varied as their authors, but all explore the unique intersections of language, tradition, cuisine, and culture that characterize the diverse experience of Americans of Italian heritage.
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Book Lust

Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

Author: Nancy Pearl

Publisher: N.A

ISBN: 9781570613814

Category: Literary Criticism

Page: 287

View: 7132

Presents 170 themed reading lists designed for any type of reading, from "chick lit" to books on bicycling, covering a wide variety of tastes and topics.
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The Italians

Author: C. J. Shane

Publisher: N.A

ISBN: 9780737727654

Category: History

Page: 208

View: 2680

Presents a series of essays on the experiences of Italians who have migrated to the United States, discussing their troubled homelands, their problems in assimilation, and their current status as a marginalized minority in American culture.
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Library Journal

Author: N.A

Publisher: N.A

ISBN: N.A

Category: Libraries

Page: N.A

View: 6370

Includes, beginning Sept. 15, 1954 (and on the 15th of each month, Sept.-May) a special section: School library journal, ISSN 0000-0035, (called Junior libraries, 1954-May 1961). Also issued separately.
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Tragic manhood and democracy

Verdi's voice and the power of musical art

Author: David A. J. Richards

Publisher: Sussex Academic Pr

ISBN: N.A

Category: Biography & Autobiography

Page: 210

View: 7120

What is tragedy? This work argues that it is, at once, art and science -- an absorbing art and precisely observed empirical inquiry into human psychology, whose subject matter is the dilemma of manhood under democracy. The author expands discussion of the idea of the tragic to include music drama in general and the operas of Verdi in particular, and explores the indispensable contribution of tragedy to an understanding of personal and political psychology through discussion of: the political theory of structural injustice resting on the suppression of voice (underlying evils like racism, sexism, and homophobia), a developmental psychology of gender (drawing on the work of Carol Gilligan -- the Harvard Project on Women's Psychology, Boy's Development and the Culture of Manhood), and an interpretation of tragic art (including the expressive role of music in it). Exploration of the tragic impact of patriarchy on democratic voice is at the heart of the power and appeal of Verdi's innovations in musical voice. At its core is a complex psychic geography of patriarchal practices imposed on personal and political relationships (parents to children, siblings to one another, and adult men and women). Such practices -- fundamental to the family, politics, and religion -- enforce demands by forms of physical and psychological violence directed by men and women at anyone who deviates from its demands. Verdi's tragic musical drama speaks of an emotional loss that literally cannot under patriarchy be spoken, namely, what the author calls the tragedy of patriarchy -- a divided psychology that lives in the tension between patriarchal practices and democratic principles, and between the psychological demands of patriarchy and democratic manhood.
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Eine kurze Geschichte der Menschheit

Author: Yuval Noah Harari

Publisher: DVA

ISBN: 364110498X

Category: History

Page: 528

View: 4671

Krone der Schöpfung? Vor 100 000 Jahren war der Homo sapiens noch ein unbedeutendes Tier, das unauffällig in einem abgelegenen Winkel des afrikanischen Kontinents lebte. Unsere Vorfahren teilten sich den Planeten mit mindestens fünf weiteren menschlichen Spezies, und die Rolle, die sie im Ökosystem spielten, war nicht größer als die von Gorillas, Libellen oder Quallen. Vor 70 000 Jahren dann vollzog sich ein mysteriöser und rascher Wandel mit dem Homo sapiens, und es war vor allem die Beschaffenheit seines Gehirns, die ihn zum Herren des Planeten und zum Schrecken des Ökosystems werden ließ. Bis heute hat sich diese Vorherrschaft stetig zugespitzt: Der Mensch hat die Fähigkeit zu schöpferischem und zu zerstörerischem Handeln wie kein anderes Lebewesen. Anschaulich, unterhaltsam und stellenweise hochkomisch zeichnet Yuval Harari die Geschichte des Menschen nach und zeigt alle großen, aber auch alle ambivalenten Momente unserer Menschwerdung.
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Meine geliebte Welt

Author: Sonia Sotomayor

Publisher: C.H.Beck

ISBN: 3406659489

Category: Biography & Autobiography

Page: 349

View: 6507

Aufgewachsen in der Bronx, Puertoricanerin, die Kindheit prekär, der Vater Alkoholiker, die Mutter überfordert – Sonia Sotomayor war es nicht gerade in die Wiege gelegt, eines Tages Richterin am höchsten Gericht der Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika zu werden. Mit einem großen Herzen und viel Humor erzählt diese Ausnahmefrau von ihrem Weg, aber nicht um sich dabei auf die Schulter zu klopfen, sondern um anderen Menschen mit ihrer eigenen Geschichte Mut zu machen. Ein hinreißendes, ansteckendes Buch über das Trotzdem und über die – wirklich wichtigen – Dinge des Lebens. „’Nach der Lektüre werden mich die Leser nach menschlichen Kriterien beurteilen’, schreibt Sonia Sotomayor. Wir, die wir in diesem Fall die Jury sind, finden sie einfach unwiderstehlich.“ Washingtonian „Überwältigende und stark geschriebene Memoiren zum Thema Identität und Persönlichkeitsfindung ... Offenherzig, scharf beobachtet und vor allem tief empfunden.“ The New York Times „Eine Frau, die weiß, wo sie herkommt und die die Kraft hat, uns dorthin mitzunehmen.“ The New York Times Book Review