A Sitdown With the Sopranos: Watching Italian American Culture on TV's Most Talked-About Series [Paperback]

Regina Barreca (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 14, 2002

With over 9.5 million viewers and in its fourth smash season, The Sopranos has profoundly altered Americans' views of New Jersey, HBO, Sunday nights, and especially Italian American culture and life. The show has not been without critics, who have lambasted The Sopranos for presenting negative stereotypes of Italian Americans. A Sitdown with the Sopranos is an insightful and balanced reply to this criticism from some of the country's most important Italian American writers. Edited by Regina Barreca, an acclaimed writer, scholar, and national columnist, the book examines eight key components of Italian American life and considers how accurately the show portrays these topics.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

English and feminist theory professor Regina Barreca gathers eight Italian-American writers' thoughts on Tony and Carmela Soprano, family, psychotherapy and more in A Sitdown with the Sopranos: Watching Italian American Culture on TV's Most Talked-About Series. "The Italian American experience being spotlighted here is a reflection of all the other versions of itself... The Sopranos is about the human experience about all of us, about the struggle to find a safe place," she writes in her introduction. The essays that follow from Sandra M. Gilbert's "Life with (God)Father" to George Anastasia's "If Shakespeare Were Alive Today" offer intelligent commentary on how the show portrays (or fails to portray) some key components of Italian-American life.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Review

"...good reads that examine Tony's character through today's standard therapeutic lenses..."--Jeremiah Creedon, Utne Reader

"In its daring intellectuality, A Sitdown With the Sopranos is as gripping as the tv show itself. All of the essays are unfailingly strong and the book’s shattering of so many dumb and hurtful conceptions about Italian Americans and their culture will alter American consciousness for good, and for the good."--Frank Lentricchia, Katherine Everett Gilbert Professor of Literature at Duke University and author of Lucchesi and the Whale

"Look, I'm half-Italian. Tony Soprano stands in front of the opened refrigerator, dropping sheets of prosciutto into his mouth, and I love him like a brother. Then he orders someone whacked and he's about as lovable as Gotti. So I'm all over the place in my response to this show, these characters. I hunger to hear from other Italian-Americans on the subject of The Sopranos and I trust Barreca to deliver the goods. Why? Because she knows humor, pathos, and marinara."--Wally Lamb, author of She’s Come Undone and I Know This Much is True

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Product Details

• Paperback: 174 pages
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan; 1 edition (September 14, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312295286
• ISBN-13: 978-0312295288
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,945,629 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Deemed a "feminist humor maven" by Ms. Magazine and "Very, very funny. For a woman" by Dave Barry, Gina Barreca is most recently the author of It's Not That I'm Bitter: How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Visible Panty Lines and Conquered the World (St. Martin's, 2009/ppb. 2010). She has appeared on 20/20, 48 Hours, NPR, the BBC, The Today Show, CNN, Joy Behar, and Oprah to discuss gender, power, politics, and humor. Her earlier books, include the bestselling They Used to Call Me Snow White But I Drifted: Women's Strategic Use of Humor, as well as Perfect Husband and Other Fairy Tales: Demystifying Men, Marriage and Romance, Sweet Revenge: The Wicked Delights of Getting Even, and Babes in Boyland: A Personal History of Coeducation in the Ivy League; her books have been translated into several languages, including Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, and German. She's the editor of seventeen books, including The Signet Book of American Humor and The Penguin Book of Women's Humor as well as The Erotics of Instruction and A Sit-Down With the Sopranos. She writes for the "Brainstorm" section of The Chronicle of Higher Education and blogs for Psychology Today, does a weekly column for The Hartford Courant, a monthly column for Principal Leadership, and occasionally spars with her former co-author (of I'm With Stupid: One Man. One Woman. 10,000 Years of Misunderstandings Between the Sexes Cleared Right Up) Gene Weingarten in his "Below the Beltway" column in The Washington Post. With degrees from Dartmouth College, Cambridge University, and the City University of New York, Barreca is Professor of English and Feminist Theory at the University of Connecticut.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Exploration of the American "Family", January 16, 2003

By 

Diana F. Von Behren "reneofc" (Kenner, LA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Sitdown With the Sopranos: Watching Italian American Culture on TV's Most Talked-About Series (Paperback)

Let's face it---there is something intriguing about the gangster character. Perhaps his rebel status--living on the edge of society, not following the usual conformist formula to gain success titilliates the majority of us who have gone the regular route. As I am an Italian American, America's fascination with the gangster and his sense of family and his affiliations with the culture and traditions of my own ethnicity strikes me as utterly amusing and ironic. It seems to contradict what Americans have always held sacred: the values of self-reliance and individualism so masterfully illustrated in the essays of Emerson and Thoureau --- values that define the American spirit. So why the Hollywood double, no, the nth-degree take on the Mafia, a body of nonconformists who adhere to their own code of honor in order to skip the assimilation process that all immigrants must undergo to enter into the mainstream American system?

Should Italian Americans be annoyed with 'Sopranos' creator, David Chase (an Italian American himself), for yet again portraying the third generational Italian American as the mobster rather than the honest businessman/doctor/lawyer who through higher education and hard work finds himself a rung on the ladder of the American Dream?

These are the types questions discussed in "A Sitdown With the Sopranos". This extremely serious book contains eight essays, all written by Italian-Americans who have assimilated into the system and are not in the least bit negatively piqued as are the Italian American anti-defammation groups who label the hit HBO television series a 'thumbs down' in almost every conceivable category. Under the guise of studying the Sopranos, these essays encompass a socialogical spectrum of all things Italian American: religion, the family, the mother/son relationship, culture, father/son relationships, manhood, even a look at how family-centric Italian Americans view such a breach of 'omerta' by participating in such a heinously un-Italian-American act of speaking to the outsider or psychoanalyst rather than a family member or a priest.

If you are Italian American, you will get the great satisfaction of knowing that America is enraptured by the Italian American family structure and intrigued by the seemingly exotic religious traditions brought to America by those true purveyors of the American Dream-- your grandparents. The analysis provided in the essays will vocalize some of the issues over which you, as an Italian American, have pondered. You will smile as you realize that your ethnic lifeblood (for surely even with the mob theme running through the Sopranos, you recognize and nod over many of the secret handshakes of Italian American life that before which have never been depicted quite so wonderfully)is suddenly very much in vogue and that your ancestors accomplished their mission. If your're not Italian American, you will recognize that even if Tony Soprano did not go through the usual route of assimilating into the American mainstream, he nevertheless must bow his head (perhaps in the form of his panic attacks) to the change of time and society. Tony's confronts the same issues that we all confront; he wants his children educated in the best schools, covets the best that life has to offer and yet feels the same spiritual void that many of us do. Highly recommended!

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Sitdown with the Sopranos, March 18, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: A Sitdown With the Sopranos: Watching Italian American Culture on TV's Most Talked-About Series (Paperback)

Editor and author Regina Barreca's newest collection of essays examines the sweetness and controversy of both revenge and cannoli in HBO's The Sopranos with an authority, authenticity and insight that only a group of fellow Italian Americans writers could provide. Taking the television series as a jumping off point to examine Italian American cultural and identity questions, the essays reflect an attraction and repulsion with the misconceptions and realities of stereotypes about Italian Americans. There are no easy answers to any of these issues, but "A Sitdown with the Sopranos," with its own remarkable cast and writers does an exceptional job of addressing them.