Two star-crossed lovers--Enza and Ciro--meet and separate, until, finally, the power of their love changes both of their lives forever. Set during the years preceding and during World War I.
It is August 15, 1953, the day of a street carnival in the Italian enclave of Elephant Park, Ohio, when Rocco LaGrassa receives an excruciating piece of news: his son has died in a POW camp in Korea. Against the background of immigration, broken loyalties, and racial hostility, the story presents everything Rocco sees through the eyes of various characters in the crowd.
The story begins in the 1950s, in a poor but vibrant neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples. Growing up on these tough streets the two girls learn to rely on each other ahead of anyone or anything else. As they grow, as their paths repeatedly diverge and converge, Elena and Lila remain best friends whose respective destinies are reflected and refracted in the other. They are likewise the embodiments of a nation undergoing momentous change. Through...
Giovanna Costa, reeling from personal tragedies, tries to make a new life for herself at the turn of the twentieth century in New York City's Little Italy. Her modest success is rewarded with the attention of the notorious Black Hand, a gang of brutal extortionists led by Lupo the Wolf.
"Rose Napolitano is fighting with her husband, Luke, about prenatal vitamins. She promised she'd take them, but didn't. He promised before they got married that he'd never want children, but now he's changed his mind. Their marriage has come to rest on this one question: Can Rose find it in herself to become a mother? Rose is a successful professor and academic. She's never wanted to have a child. The fight ends, and with it their marriage. But then,...
"At sixty-six, Lorenzo Carcaterra finds it easier to reflect on the past than ruminate on the future. "By the time you reach my age," he writes, "you have witnessed too much loss to not be aware of what lies ahead." This turn to the past inspired a poignant memoir about the women who made him the man he is today. His Italian grandmother, Nonna Maria, gave him his first taste of a loving home during the summers he spent with her as a teenager on Ischia,...
Working at a bookstore in Berkeley, Gabriele becomes intrigued by the orders of signor Vietri, a customer from Rome whose numerous purchases grow increasingly mystical and esoteric. She quits her job and, landing in Rome, decides to look up Vietri. Following a trail of obituaries and military records, a memoir of life in a village forgotten by modernity, and the court records of a communist murder trial, Gabriele meets an eclectic assortment of the...
"Such a Pretty Girl is Nadina LaSpina's story--from her early years in her native Sicily, where still a baby she contracts polio, a fact that makes her the object of well-meaning pity and the target of messages of hopelessness; to her adolescence and youth in America, spent almost entirely in hospitals, where she is tortured in the quest for a cure and made to feel that her body no longer belongs to her; to her rebellion and her activism in the disability...
The bestselling author of Brunelleschi's dome and Michelangelo and the Pope's ceiling captures the excitement and spirit of the Renaissance in this chronicle of the life and work of 'the king of the world's booksellers" and the technological disruption that forever changed the ways knowledge spread.
"The innocence of childhood collides with the stark aftermath of war in this wrenching and ultimately redemptive tale of family, seemingly impossible choices, and the winding paths to destiny, which sometimes take us to places far beyond our imaginings." - Lisa Wingate, #1 New York Times Bestselling Author of Before We Were Yours and The Book of Lost Friends Based on true events, a heartbreaking story of love, family, hope, and survival set in post-World...
Godmothers to one another's children, four women who married into a prosperous Italian family must come together, despite secrets and betrayals, when their husbands are forced to leave them during World War II, pitting them against notorious gangsters who run the streets of New York City.
Maria Laurino strips away stereotypes and nostalgia to tell the complicated, centuries-long story of the true Italian-American experience. Looking beyond the familiar caricatures fostered by popular culture, she tells the stories of Sicilian workers imported to replace the labor of freed slaves, the grim realities from which most immigrants came, the lynchings of Italian Americans, and the first uses of the word "mafia." Laurino shows how Italian...
"The first full-scale biography of the Nobel Prize-winning physicist and one of the fathers of the atomic age, Enrico Fermi. Enrico Fermi is unquestionably the most famous scientist to come from Italy since Galileo, so revered that he's known as The Pope of Physics. A modest, unassuming man, Fermi was nevertheless one of the most productive and creative scientists of the twentieth century, one of the fathers of the Atomic Bomb and a Nobel Prize winner...
"Today middle class consumers in the Americas drive the transatlantic trade in Italian foods associated with refined consumption--award-winning regional wines, herb infused olive oils, heirloom San Marzano canned tomatoes, syrupy balsamic vinegars, and pungent slabs of aged parmigiano cheese. At the same time, pizza and pasta are considered typical fare in the U.S. and Argentina. Both developments reflect major changes since the late 19th century...
"Can a single night define a man's life? From the summer of 1943 to early 1945, John Basilone was one of the most famous and admired people in America. As the first enlisted man to be awarded the Medal of Honor in World War II, for extraordinary bravery under fire at Guadalcanal, he toured the nation with movie stars, shared podiums with mayors and governors, shook the hands of thousands of citizens, and was even rumored to have made a romantic connection...