In the latest installment of Scottoline's best-selling series starring the all-female Philadelphia law firm of Rosato & Associates, young Mary DiNunzio takes center stage. Mary has taken on a pro bono case representing her "peeps"--an Italian American business group (the circolo) working on behalf of the estate of Amadeo Brandolini, who committed suicide while interned during World War II.
This highly acclaimed and uniquely comprehensive book offers readers over 2500 years of Italian and Italian-American accomplishments. The book's 22 chapters cover every subject: art, architecture, music, fashion, science, law, culinary arts, economics, medicine, automobiles, the entertainment industry, sports, and much more.
Since Columbus arrived 500 years ago, some five-and-a-half-million other Italians have made the long journey across the Atlantic in search of a better life for their families. La Storia provides a complete account of their particularly rich exodus and Americanization.
Following an introduction of other scholars' efforts to collect data about Italian American folk customs, the authors present a history of Italian immigration from Europe to the eastern United States and California (which began largely around 1880).
The deadlocked Papal conclave turns to a compromise candidate, Anthony Cardinal Pavelli. Ordained at fifty years of age, and in declining health, the seventy-two year old American, is an unlikely choice. Reluctantly accepting the scepter as God's will, the Pontiff is eager to reinvigorate the Church by initiating sweeping reforms. A group of ruthless cardinals, each with his own agenda, band together to stop the reforms by discrediting the Pope.
This unusual autobiography begins with the author looking back on his early life and wondering how it is possible that he lived to see his first birthday. As he says in this uplifting tribute to a life lived to the fullest, he simply wouldn't die. From the first sentence to the last you will wonder just as the author does how and why miracles occur.
There is an Old Italian saying in Italy: "L’acqua corre ma il sangue Italiano addensa." Water runs, but Italian blood thickens. A child prodigy at five years old is forced to pick coal for his immigrant family from the railroad tracks to heat their humble home. He meets the poor, black coalpicker, Miss Beulah; she was his Mamma's emergency mid-wife who had breathed life into the "blue baby." Nurtured by his beloved Mamma, and the bible-toting Miss Beulah, he asks why he does not have a Nonno. She tells the teen that her Papa's business partner with the help of the sinister, greedy underworld mobsters, La Mano Nera, the Black Hand, poisoned his Nonno to steal his real estate holding in the Bronx. Angered by the poverty brought to la famiglia, obsessed, he leads a double life, marries the NY Don's daughter, and begins a clandestine, methodical drive to seek revenge, swears on his Nonno's grave a personal vendetta. Stolen Blood! Vendetta-Italian Style.
With the irreverence, gutsy spirit, and warmhearted hilarity that made Pagan Babies a classic, here is the Italian-American experience served up by the author who has been crowned the Patron Saint of Humor. In our overly pasteurized and homogenized world, there's a real hunger to find and celebrate our connection to old world roots and traditions. Life al Dente abounds in hilarious stories, but also rewards readers with a genuine and poignant contemplation of cultural identity.
A history of the rise of the Mafia in the world of crime and in the mainstream American political and economic life. American Mafia is a fascinating look at America's most compelling criminal subculture from an author who is intimately acquainted with both sides of the street.
This is a true story of the Finazzo family who traveled from Sicily to America in search of the fabled American Dream, only to find poverty, tragedies, prison, death and even murder. It was the era of prohibition, speakeasies, and later The Great Depression, gangsters, racketeers and the mafia that corrupted the neighborhood in Brooklyn New York where they migrated.
A humorous, coming-of-age story about growing up with no musical talent in a very musical Italian-American community. It's about music of course -- you get intimate with a bassoon, you practice, you go to several lessons and band concerts, you learn why pianos are from Venus and clarinets are from Mars.
Yo Capeesh! is the complete handbook for true Italian living. A humorous, educational and sentimental guide to Italian Americana, Yo Capeesh! is a dictionary for interpreting the pungent hyperbolic clichés and mysteries of Italian American culture.
This anthology is a genuine landmark -- the first general-reader hardcover collection of writing by Italian American authors. It is part manifesto, part Sunday dinner -- a gathering of voices old and new, some speaking in the accents of another age, some completely contemporary and assured, all together for the first time.
This newly revised second edition is now available in a bilingual format and has been expanded from the original 1492 to 1776 fact-filled questions. The five major categories (Food, Music, Entertainment; Art, Science, Literature; History, Geography, Business; Sports; Romans)cover 3,000 years of Italian genius and innovation, with an index of over 2,700 entries.
Ciongoli and Parini delve into the great wave of Italian
immigration that began in the late 19th century, exploring everything
from conditions in Italy to the Italian assimilation in the U.S. under
such chapters as "Saints of the Immigrants" and "Little
Italies."
Papaleo's appealing stories of an Italian community
in the Bronx of the 1930s and 1940s highlight the universality of
his characters' experiences, which could just as well take place in
Armenian, Irish, or other ethnic communities in America.
Reveals the inner workings of New York's Five Families-Bonanno, Gambino, Profaci, Lucchese, and Genovese-and uncovers how the Mafia not only dominated local businesses, but also influenced national politics. A fascinating glimpse into the world of crime, A Man of Honor is an unforgettable account of one of the most powerful crime figures in America's history.
Carcaterra's controversial memoir of growing up in NYC's Hell's Kitchen and as an inmate at a sadistic detention center was a PW bestseller for eight weeks.
Since its first publication in 1974, Blood of my blood has become the most highly esteemed book on Italian Americans. It is also rare that it is both a bestseller and a college text.
Leadership Through the Ages is a specially created compendium of over 250 inspiring quotations from Winston Churchill to Will Rogers, and Eleanor Roosevelt to Lee Iacocca. Introduction by Rudolph W. Giuliani.
The Black Madonna has long protected her mountain villagers in southern Italy, and some say she followed her people to America. What else explains the magic and miracles on Spring Street in Little Italy over the decades?
A magical, warm, and wise novel about a close-knit family's immigration from Sicily to America in the early 1900s. The Santuzzus are poor Sicilian farm laborers who endure back-breaking work in the fields of a tyrannical landlord. Wanting more for their children and grandchildren than a lifetime of servitude, Papa Santuzzu and his wife Adriana push their seven sons and daughters, one by one, to immigrate to La Merica, a land of promise and opportunity.
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.
This important collection reveals as never before the quality, extent, and variety of the Italian American contribution to American literature. Bringing together fiction and poetry as well as academic essays and newspaper articles from the 1800s to the present, this volume covers a wide field of cultural experience.
This dazzling collection of original essays from some of the countries' leading thinkers asks the rather intriguing question - Are Italians White? Each piece carefully explores how, when and why whiteness became important to Italian Americans, and the significance of gender, class and nation to racial identity.
As each generation of Italian-Americans dissolves further into the melting pot, it becomes more urgent to recognize the talents and gifts of their forebears. The pride of being Italian is something that is passed on from parent to child, and so Italian Pride is written by an Italian-American father and son, whose intention is to convey what is best and most noble in their heritage.
From the Roman calendar and the creator of the modern orchestra (Claudio Monteverdi) to the beginnings of ballet and the creator of modern political science (Niccolò Machiavelli), Sprezzatura highlights fifty great Italian cultural achievements in a series of fifty information-packed essays in chronological order
A modern masterpiece, The Godfather has sold millions of copies, inspired three of the finest films in recent times, and spawned a new genre in fiction. Now this landmark work has been abridged for the first time, under special arrangement with Mario Puzo.
Set in the glittering, vibrant New York City of 1950, Lucia, Lucia is the enthralling story of a passionate, determined young woman whose decision to follow her heart changes her life forever.
Studs Terkel provides the preface to this classic examination of the American experience for hardworking Italian immigrants who lived in New York's lower East side shortly before the Great Depression.
