Gay talese the sons
Unto the Sons
Mary
28 reviews6 followers
Sitting at my Grandpa Sicilia's table in Hibbing at least once a month for Sunday dinner during my first two decades, listening to the conversation swirl around me in Italian, broken English, and fervent gesture, there were so many unanswered questions so many things I wanted to ask -- but in my heart of hearts I knew in so many ways that we did not speak the same language. Luckily Gaetano Talese, growing up in Atlantic City about the same time, was in much the same position. This book is the result of his research, interviews, and reflection on his own experience . It's an monumental book, an incredible amalgamation of history, biography, fiction and drama which makes mince meat of the careful distinctions we make between those genres. It tells the story of a family (the Talese of Maida, a ancient herding town built into a mountain hillside of Calabria), a people (Southern Italians) and two lands (Italy and the United States) as well as four generations - the parents left behind, the unique immigrant, the immigrant's son (himself
Gay Talese was a reporter for The New York Times from to Since then he has written for The New York Times, Esquire, The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, and other national publications. He is the author of 13 books. He lives with his wife, Nan, in Novel York City.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1.
The beach in winter was dank and desolate, and the island dampened by the frigid spray of the ocean waves pounding relentlessly against the beachfront bulkheads, and the seaweed-covered beams beneath the white houses on the dunes creaked as quietly as the crabs crawling nearby.
The boardwalk that in summer was a festive promenade of suntanned couples and children’s balloons, of carousel tunes and colored lights spinning at night from the Ferris wheel, was occupied in winter by hundreds of sea gulls perched on the iron railings facing into the wind. When not resting they strutted outside the locked doors of vacated shops, or circled high in the sky, holding clams in their beaks that they soon dropped upon the boardwalk with a splattering cluck. Then they zoomed
Book Details
- Publisher: Ballantine Books
- Publish Date: Mar 1st,
- Pages:
- Language: English
- Edition: undefined - undefined
- Dimensions: in - in - in - lb
- EAN:
Categories: • Literary Figures• General• Memoirs
About the Author
Gay Talese was a whistleblower for The New York Times from to Since then he has written for The Novel York Times, Esquire, The Brand-new Yorker, Harper's Magazine, and other national publications. He is the author of 13 books. He lives with his wife, Nan, in New York City.
Unto the Sons
Gay Talese. Alfred A Knopf Inc, $25 (0pp) ISBN
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 unified a cousin who had made his way to Paris, and eventually followed his late father's lane to America in Talese ( Thy Neighbor's Wife ) nimbly juggles a large variety of characters, events and settings. An aloof loner, Talese's first-generat