Anthony Graziano, La Bell'America

Talking Leaves…Books will host Anthony Graziano for a reading and book signing on Saturday, December 12, at 1 pm at our Main Street location, to celebrate publication of his memoir/history, La Bell’America: From La Rivoluzione to the Great Depression: an Italian Immigrant Family Remembered (Leapfrog Press).  Books will be available for purchase at this free event, to which the public is invited.

In this picture of Europe’s 19th century and the massive immigration of Italians to America, Graziano writes of wars and conflicts, of popes and kings fighting the people’s demands for democratic government. When religion and royalty failed to preserve their control, leaders turned to dictatorships and threw the world into bloody conflicts, killing millions and virtually destroying Europe. Caught up were the poverty stricken, powerless common people who realized their only hope for democracy and fulfillment was to leave Europe. They became the immigrants of the 19th and 20th centuries, pushed from Europe, pulled to America. Their history is made alive in the author’s deeply personal account of his family – their immigration to America from Italy; their survival through poverty, prejudice, and the Great Depression; and their ultimate success and intense loyalty to their adopted land, La bell’America. It is through the personal, sensitive story of these real people that the reader gains a fresh understanding of history, of the sociological changes of the last two centuries, of the vast exodus from Europe. La bell’America is a fascinating and engaging blend of history and personal drama, and it has a great deal to say to us in the 21st century. 

[An] exuberant memoir. Graziano's narrative…stretches back to his 19th-century ancestors in        Maida, lush reminiscences of his Depression-era boyhood in Nyack, N.Y.… The author includes iconic vignettes of steerage and arrival, digressions on Italian history and sociological exegeses of the ways immigrants adapted Italy's peasant culture to America, along with novelistic domestic    scenes—family dinners, street vendors, wash-day rituals—that are almost Proustian in their detail. … a rich study of the immigrant adventure.
—Publishers Weekly starred review

Anthony M. Graziano, Professor Emeritus, Paychology, at the State University of New York, Buffalo, is the author of 15 books and 50 articles on research methodology, childhood disorders, parent training, and many related topics. He is also known as an exceptional Italian chef. His brother, parents, and extended family emigrated from Italy. He says, “This is a book in celebration of immigrants. It speaks to us because we are all immigrants.”