Unto the Sons
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4.5 • 13 Ratings
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
"An Italian ROOTS." —The Washington Post Book World
At long last, Gay Talese, one of America's greatest living authors, employs his prodigious storytelling gifts to tell the saga of his own family's emigration to America from Italy in the years preceding World War II. Ultimately it is the story of all immigrant families and the hope and sacrifice that took them from the familiarity of the old world into the mysteries and challenges of the new.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Filtering the history of Italian immigration to America through the personal saga of Talese's family, this massive and masterful volume recreates the author's ancestral home in the Southern Italian backwater of Maida, vivifying a superstitious, impoverished, apolitical and powerless underclass that for centuries was exploited by both its own aristocracy and a parade of foreign rulers and invaders. In Maida the author's great-grandfather Domenico ruled his farm with an iron hand; lured by a dream of prosperity, Talese's grandfather Gaetano left his family in Italy and worked himself to an early grave in a Pennsylvania asbestos-factory town. Gaetano's son Joseph witnessed the devastation that WW I heaped on his village, apprenticed as a tailor to a kindly uncle in Maida, later joined a cousin who had made his way to Paris, and eventually followed his late father's path to America in 1920. Talese ( Thy Neighbor's Wife ) nimbly juggles a large variety of characters, events and settings. An aloof loner, Talese's first-generation American mother, Catherine, grew up in an insular Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn, N.Y.; the walls of her home were hung with crucifixes, and her parents, who had both experienced tragic earlier marriages in the old country, wore the dark clothes of mourning. Raised in Ocean City, N.J., as a minority within a minority (an Italian in an Irish Catholic parish on a Protestant island), Talese recalls an exacting father who never played ball with him and who used him as a mannequin for his clothing creations. A story that will resonate for parents and children of every nationality relates how Joseph, torn between his loyalty to his adopted homeland and his love for his family in Italy, lost control of himself during WW II; upon learning that the Allies had bombed an abbey in southern Italy, he shut his ears to his son's cries and destroyed the fleet of model U.S. aircraft that Gay had painstakingly built. 300,000 first printing; BOMC main selection.
Customer Reviews
A bit of effort required on the part of the reader but this book is its own reward!
There's a LOT going on in this book... between the 2 dozen or so stories which span several centuries, and the vivid descriptions of life and lives during different historical eras - each punctuated with a dramatic history lesson.
It's no casual read. There are lots of characters, family members and historical figures to keep in mind as the stories unfurl, but I found it to be well worth the extra mental effort I had put into this book. My understanding of European and American history & culture -especially from mid 19th thru mid 20th centuries has increased immeasurably having read it. The author puts that history into context against his colorful family stories.
I would seriously suggest that if you decide to read this book, that you make a family tree diagram in order to keep track of Gay Telese's extended family. The characters are referred to time and again in different stories... and they are characters worth keeping track of!