Customer Reviews

Mount Allegro: A Memoir of Italian American Life (New York Classics)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
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Jerre Mangione's writing is so vivid that reading it brought back my childhood years in the 20's and 30's. His Mt Allegro (NY) was my Silver Lake (NJ). His parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, neighbors were mine with similar names. His family gatherings were mine, too. In this land of immigrants, each era has its own stories of growing up in America. Mangione tells his with the greatest affection, bitter-sweet nostalgia, and tender humor. Recently,I gave a copy of Mt Allegro to my Aunt Angie for her 87th birthday. She plans to pass it along to her older sisters.

I really enjoyed reading this book. I had to review it for a seminar in grad school. It reminded me of stories I have heard from my Italian grandmother.

A wonderful read for anyone with Italian roots!

A great book on an old Italian neighborhood, now long gone, in Rochester, NY. I loved it & I'm not even from Rochester. It truly is a universal story. Enjoy!!

This is a wonderful book about an Italian family written by the son ... It is filled with amusing stories and familiar family behaviors ... Fun to read ...

I loved this book so much that I bought one for each of my four adult children, and one for my cousins, for Christmas. Although it gets just a tad bogged down in the middle, it is overall a wonderfully entertaining book with valuable information for my kids to know (like - "Hey! I'm not crazy! I'm Sicilian! :)" What I mean is, sometimes we do things and we really have no idea why. It's what we learned. This book helps us to diagnose which parts of our culture we want to keep, and which things are flexible. I especially love that he shows and appreciates all the positive attributes of Italian culture: the warm generosity, caring, family oriented virtues, which make people feel instantly welcome. It's a talent I have that I now realize not every culture passes on to their young. I also loved that the book is SICILIAN and ROCHESTER. He describes in detail people I remember (like the street vendors).

This is by far the most entertaining book I've read on Italian-American culture so far. The author has a unique way of speaking about the good, the bad and the ugly part of the Sicilian culture and experience, but he does it without offending anyone. I can't count how many times I burst out laughing at the behavior of some of his many colorful characters. I am not Italian but I am married to a Calabrese and I felt like I was reading about many of my in-laws. Now that I am done reading it, I am passing it on to my husband. I told him it was a must read for him and everybody in his family. He would relate to it more than me, but even if you are not Italian or Sicilian or even married to one, this is definitely a book to read just for entertainment purposes. Though many of the stories are hysterical they are very well written. I don't think the author was trying to be funny, he was just writing from the heart and his experiences growing up stuck between two cultures and that's about as funny as it gets.