Unto the Sons [Mass Market Paperback]

Gay Talese (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 23, 1993

"An Italian ROOTS." The Washington Post Book World
At long last, Gay Talese, one of America's greatest living authors, employs his prodigious storytelling gifts to tell the saga of his own family's emigration to America from Italy in the years preceding World War II. Ultimately it is the story of all immigrant families and the hope and sacrifice that took them from the familiarity of the old world into the mysteries and challenges of the new.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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 joined a cousin who had made his way to Paris, and eventually followed his late father's path to America in 1920. Talese ( Thy Neighbor's Wife ) nimbly juggles a large variety of characters, events and settings. An aloof loner, Talese's first-generation American mother, Catherine, grew up in an insular Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn, N.Y.; the walls of her home were hung with crucifixes, and her parents, who had both experienced tragic earlier marriages in the old country, wore the dark clothes of mourning. Raised in Ocean City, N.J., as a minority within a minority (an Italian in an Irish Catholic parish on a Protestant island), Talese recalls an exacting father who never played ball with him and who used him as a mannequin for his clothing creations. A story that will resonate for parents and children of every nationality relates how Joseph, torn between his loyalty to his adopted homeland and his love for his family in Italy, lost control of himself during WW II; upon learning that the Allies had bombed an abbey in southern Italy, he shut his ears to his son's cries and destroyed the fleet of model U.S. aircraft that Gay had painstakingly built. 300,000 first printing; BOMC main selection.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Unlike Talese's past best sellers (e.g., Honor Thy Father , LJ 12/1/71; and Thy Neighbor's Wife , LJ 6/15/80), this new book is a personal saga. Talese starts generations back, interweaving tales of his ancestors in Europe during the 19th and early 20th centuries with his own childhood years in Ocean City, New Jersey during World War II. The Talese clan lived for generations in the tiny southern Italian village of Maida. Like most Americans of immigrant background, they came to the United States through a mixture of survival and good fortune. As well, these people each possessed a proud history, a tradition, and a reality that went beyond the shore of their newly adopted country. A fine storyteller, Talese penned this odyssey with affection, but also with the clear-eyed sense of the dramatic and noble lives of his forebears. The result, after ten years of preparation, is a grand epic along the lines of Alex Haley's Roots ( LJ 10/15/76) and Irving Howe's The World of Our Fathers (HBJ, 1976). This is highly recommended. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 10/1/91-- David Nudo, "Li brary Journal"
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 627 pages
• Publisher: Ivy Books (January 23, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0804110336
• ISBN-13: 978-0804110334
• Product Dimensions: 7 x 4.3 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #232,300 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Revealing background to immigration to the USA, September 27, 1999

By 

Christine Smigel (Oregon.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Unto the Sons (Mass Market Paperback)

This magnificently written portrait of the extraordinary spirit of the Italian people, and the decision of some of them to leave Southern Italy, skillfully portrays the life and customs of small towns in pre war Calabria and New Jersey.

It introduces us to many fascinating and industrious people, and their struggle in the two world wars.

It also shows us to what it felt like to be an immigrant in the United States before the last war, and what it meant to see your children grow up as citizens of a country that was actively allied against your beloved homeland.

It is a superb account of the role Italian people have played in the development of this country, the richness of their culture and the expertise they have brought with them.

A definate "Must Read" for anyone interested in Italy and the dynamics of the USA.

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Unto the Sons, March 3, 2001

By 

Maria Pia Capozzoli - See all my reviews

This review is from: Unto the Sons (Mass Market Paperback)

As an Italian reader I found this book very involving and enjoyable.

It's a passionate, well written story of emigration, and it's a story about roots and identity.

In my opinion the only fault of this book is that it isn't the story of the whole family, but only of half of it.

The Talese saga depicts a world crowded with very interesting and well-portrayed male characters. It's the story of their dreams and their disappointments, of their failures and their achievements and of the risks they dared to take in the struggle for a better life in the old and in the new world throughout a century. It's a story about the troubles of a double loyalty and, to some extent, it's a journey home.

And I must say I found very interesting to look at a piece of italian history through the eyes of a second generation Italian-American.

In sharp contrast, the female characters are pale ghosts, barely sketched shadows wandering in the narrow space of an old house, of a narrow Southern Italian village, of an American store. Even Ippolita, the grand-grandmother, the only non-conventional woman of the family, remains hidden to us. And I happened to wonder whether Talese is not able to find anything really worthy of attention in these women and in their lives,portrayed as just spent in the shadow of their men (fathers, husbands, sons), or if they live in a world of their own, completely impenetrable to him. Whatever the answer, Talese seems to be aware of this imbalance: the title of the book is "Unto the Sons" and the sons are the male children.

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An epic tale, June 7, 2000

By 

David Wihowski (Milwaukee, WI USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Unto the Sons (Mass Market Paperback)

This is a sweeping epic about an Italian family. Gay Talese has a rich family history and he tell's their story (in a way it is his story) with the voice of a novelist.

There are many characters who might appear uniteresting if we were to "meet them on the street," but Talese's ability to get under their skin, as it were, gives them individuality, personality and humanity. And this is the story of the characters: it is not contrived by the author--though, of course, he tailers their stories to fit HIS book.

This is not a romanticized tale. Sometimes it is dark, with stern, superstitious ancestors and bleak events. Yet when it was over I felt a warmth for most of the characters in it.

This is the epic of many Americans. My own ancestors had many similar experiences. My ancestors are fairly recent German and Swedish immigrants, but much of their story is the story of the Talese family. It is the story of our own individuality striving against our heritage and either coming to terms with it or rejecting it.

Gay Talese has helped my understand myself in terms of my own heritage through this excellent book.