Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
241
result(s) for
"Italian Americans Biography."
Sort by:
L Is for Lion
Finalist for the 2014 Lambda Literary Award in the Lesbian
Memoir/Biography Category presented by the Lambda Literary
Foundation This vivid memoir speaks the intense truth of a
Bronx tomboy whose 1960s girlhood was marked by her father's
lullabies laced with his dissociative memories of combat in World
War II. At four years old, Annie Rachele Lanzillotto bounced her
Spaldeen on the stoop and watched the boys play stickball in the
street; inside, she hid silver teaspoons behind the heat pipes to
tap calls for help while her father beat her mother. At eighteen,
on the edge of ambitious freedom, her studies at Brown University
were halted by the growth of a massive tumor inside her chest. Thus
began a wild, truth-seeking journey for survival, fueled by the
lessons of lasagna vows, and Spaldeen ascensions. From the stoops
of the Bronx to cross-dressing on the streets of Egypt, from the
cancer ward at Memorial Sloan-Kettering to New York City's gay club
scene of the '80s, this poignant and authentic story takes us from
underneath the dining room table to the stoop, the sidewalk, the
street, and, ultimately, out into the wide world of immigration,
gay subculture, cancer treatment, mental illness, gender dynamics,
drug addiction, domestic violence, and a vast array of Italian
American characters. With a quintessential New Yorker as narrator
and guide, this journey crescendos in a reluctant return home to
the timeless wisdom of a peasant, immigrant grandmother, Rosa
Marsico Petruzzelli, who shows us the sweetest essence of soul.
eBook
When I am Italian
\"My American ancestral Italian village was in Waterbury, Connecticut.\" In this sentence, Joanna Clapps Herman raises the central question of this book: To what extent can a person born outside of Italy be considered Italian? The granddaughter of Italian immigrants who arrived in the United States in the early 1900s, Herman takes a complicated and nuanced look at the question of to whom and to which culture she ultimately belongs. Sometimes the Italian part of her identity--her Italianitلa--feels so aboriginal as to be inchoate, unexpressible. Sometimes it finds its expression in the rhythms of daily life. Sometimes it is embraced and enhanced; at others, it feels attenuated. \"If, like me,\" Herman writes, \"you are from one of Italy's overseas colonies, at least some of this Italianitلa will be in your skin, bones, and heart: other pieces have to be understood, considered, called to ourselves through study, travel, reading. How do we know which pieces are which?\"--Provided by publisher.
Book
The Value of Worthless Lives
The writer Giuseppe Prezzolini said that Italian immigrants left behind tears and sweat but not words,making their lives in America mostly in silence, their memories private and stories untold.In this innovative portrait of the Italian-American experience, these lives are no longer hidden. Ilaria Serra offers the first comprehensive study of a largely ignored legacy-the autobiographies written by immigrants.Here she looks closely at fifty-eight representative works written during the high tide of Italian migration.Scouring archives, discovering diaries, and memoirs in private houses and forgotten drawers, Serra recovers the voices of the first generation-bootblacks and poets, film directors and farmers, miners, anarchists, andseamstresses-compelled to tell their stories. Mostly unpublished, often thickly accented, these tales of ordinary men and women are explored in nuanced detail, organized to reflect how they illuminate the realities ofwork, survival, identity, and change.Moving between history and literature, Serra presents each as the imaginative record of a self in the making and the collective story of the journey to selfhood that is the heart of the immigrant experience.
eBook
American Woman, Italian Style
With writings that span more than thirty-five years, American Woman, Italian Style is a rich collection of essays that fleshes out the realities of today's Italian American women and explores the myriad ways they continue to add to the American experience. The status of modern Italian-American women in the United States isnoteworthy: their quiet and continued growth into respected positions in the professional worlds of law and medicine surpasses the success achieved in that of the general population-so too does their educational attainment and income.Contributions include Donna Gabaccia on the oral-to-written history of cookbooks, Carol Helstosky on the Tradition of Invention, an interview with Sandra Gilbert, Paul Levitt's look at Lucy Mancini as a metaphor for the modern world, William Egelman's survey of women's work patterns, and Edvige Giunta on the importance of a selfconscious understanding of memory. There are explorations of Jewish-Italian intermarriages and interpretations of entrepreneurship in Milwaukee. Readers will find challenges to common assumptions and stereotypes, departures from normal samplings, and springboards to further research.American Woman, Italian Style: Italian Americana's Best Writings on Women offers unique insights into issues of gender and ethnicity and is a voice for the less heard and less seen side of the Italian-American experience from immigrant times to the present. Instead of seeking consensus or ideological orthodoxy, this collectionbrings together writers with a wide range of backgrounds, outlooks, ideas, and experiences. It is an impressive postmodern collection for interdisciplinary studies: a book and a look about being and becoming an American.
eBook
Old World daughter, New World mother : an education in love & freedom
Combining lived experience with research and reporting on our contemporary work-family dilemmas, Laurino brews an unusual and affirming blend of contemporary and traditional values. No other book has attempted to discuss feminism through the prism of ethnic identity, or to merge the personal and the analytical with such a passionate and intelligent literary voice. Prizing both individual freedom and an Old World in which the dependent young and old are cherished, Laurino makes clear how much the New World offers and how much it has yet to learn.
Book
Merchant Writers
The birthplace of Boccaccio, Machiavelli, and the powerful Medici family, Florence was also the first great banking and commercial centre of continental Europe. The city's middle-class merchants, though lacking the literary virtuosity of its most famous sons, were no less prolific as writers of account books, memoirs, and diaries. Written by ordinary men, these first-hand accounts of commercial life recorded the everyday realities of their businesses, families, and personal lives alongside the high drama of shipwrecks, plagues, and political conspiracies.
Published in Italian in 1986, Vittore Branca's collection of these accounts established the importance of the genre to the study of Italian society and culture. This new English translation ofMerchant Writersincludes all the texts from the original Italian edition in their entirety. Moreover, it offers a gripping personal introduction to the mercantile world of medieval and Renaissance Florence.
eBook
A Circular Journey
A Circular Journey collects for the first time in one book the essays that most powerfully define the unique gifts of one of America's most distinctive voices. These fifteen pieces, tracking some thirty years of a writer's life, come together to illuminate the stages and themes and places that mark Helen Barolini's art. Divided into three closely linked sections-Home,Abroad,Return,-the essays move through Barolini's worlds. Her love of literature began when, as a child growing up as an avid reader in Syracuse, New York, she was presented with a diary and told to write in it. Returning to the heritage of her Italian immigrant grandparents, she moved to Italy as a young writer. There she lived for many years, becoming acquainted with the brightest of Italy's literary lights. The accomplished poet, novelist, and critic she became now lives at home in two nurturing cultures, America and Italy both.The essays are memoirs of her house on a street named for Henry James's grandfather, tales of literary journeys from Taos to Taormina, and Paris to Rome, as the young bride of a poet from the Veneto and, later on, as a distinguished writer whose explorations of identity and dislocation took her back to Italian inspirations.From a delightful account of a writing fellowship in an exquisite villa overlooking the Italian lakes to her first trip back to discover distant family roots in the hills of Calabria, Barolini moves lyrically through the generations of her life, giving form to the influences that shaped her art and her sense of self-as an American, a woman, and a gifted daughter of the two cultures she has so powerfully imagined.Praise for Helen BaroliniAn impassioned and magnificent contribution to our knowledge of what it has meant and means still to be an ethnic American and woman . . . . a book of heroic recovery and affirmation.-Alice Walker (on The Dream Book)Large in scope, in depth, and in the gift of narrative.-Cynthia Ozick (on Umbertina)
eBook