“I was born in 1944, but raised in the twelfth century.” With that, Joanna Clapps Herman neatly describes the two worlds she inhabited while growing up as the child of Italian American immigrants in Waterbury, Connecticut, a place embedded with values closer to Homer’s Greece than to Anglo-American New England, where the ethic of hospitality was and still is more Middle Eastern and North African than Anglo-European, and where the pageantry and ritual were more pagan Mediterranean than Western Christian. It was also a place where a stuffed monkey wearing a fedora sat and continues to sit on her grandmother’s piano, and a place where, when the donkey got stubborn and wouldn’t plow the field, her grandfather bit the animal in a fury. In essays filled with wry humor and affectionate yet probing insights, Herman maps and makes palpable the very particular details of this culture–its pride and its shame, its profound loyalty and its Byzantine betrayals.
The Anarchist Bastard: Growing Up Italian in America
$32.95
Only 2 left in stock
Be the first to review “The Anarchist Bastard: Growing Up Italian in America” Cancel reply
Related products
PBA Local & US History
Italians of the North End: A History of Grit, Perseverance & Tradition
$24.99
Italian American Culture/Studies
From Sicily to Elizabeth Street: Housing and Social Change Among Italian Immigrants, 1880-1930
$31.95
PBA Italian American Culture/Studies
New Italian Migrations to the United States: Vol. 2: Art and Culture since 1945 BT Ruberto & Sciorra
$25.00
Italian American Culture/Studies
Dixie’s Italians: Sicilians, Race, and Citizenship in the Jim Crow Gulf South
$45.00
Italian American Culture/Studies
Sense of Origins : A Study of New York’s Young Italian Americans
$36.95
Sale!
Reviews
There are no reviews yet.