An edifying portrayal of an indefatigably purposeful life.
A debut biography focuses on an Italian-American entrepreneur who essentially invented modern banking.
Valente’s book examines the life of Amadeo Pietro Giannini, who was born in 1870 in California. He was the son of Italian immigrants who came to the United States in 1869 in search of opportunity. When he was only 6 years old, he witnessed his father’s murder—he was shot to death by one of his workers over a wage dispute—a traumatic experience that taught the boy an early lesson about the gossamer vulnerability of life. His mother married Lorenzo Scatena, an Italian entrepreneur who owned a thriving produce company and who would become a mentor to Giannini. The boy displayed a precocious talent for business and an insatiable ambition. At 14, he dropped out of school to work for L. Scatena & Co. full time. He pioneered the purchase of produce on consignment and, by the end of 1885, was the company’s chief salesman; at 21, he was a full partner. In 1892, he married Clorinda Agnes Cuneo, the daughter of a wealthy real estate tycoon. When Giannini’s father-in-law died, he became the executor of his will, which included shares in and a directorship of Columbus Savings and Loan. Giannini had a vision for the bank’s egalitarian transformation—he wanted to shift its focus to accepting deposits from and dispensing loans to less affluent Italian-Americans, a plan considered so radical he eventually resigned from the board. He started his own bank—the Bank of Italy—which later became part of holdings that included Bank of America. Giannini’s banking empire revolutionized the industry by turning it toward the establishment of local branches under centralized supervision. Valente, writing in crystal clear prose, concisely captures not only Giannini’s entrepreneurial boldness, but also his abiding commitment to social reform and civic causes. After the disastrous San Francisco earthquake in 1906, “he helped the city rise from the ashes by making loans ‘on a face and a signature’ to the small businesses and people whose lives were shattered.” Part of the Barbera Foundation’s Mentoris Project, devoted to biographies of historically significant Italians and Italian-Americans, Valente’s study is scrupulously researched, both informative and inspiring. She also furnishes a vivid portrait not only of the corruption of turn-of-the-century San Francisco, but also the inhospitality Italian immigrants routinely encountered in the United States.
An edifying portrayal of an indefatigably purposeful life.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-947431-04-1
Page Count: 218
Publisher: Barbera Foundation, Inc.
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
