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AN ITALIAN EDUCATION

THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF AN EXPATRIATE IN VERONA

A witty, cynical, and ultimately charming account by an English expatriate married to a native and trying to raise his children in Italy. Parks (Italian Neighbors, 1992) has lived in Italy for the past decade, teaching English at the University of Verona. The author of seven novels (Shear, 1994, etc.), he brings his perceptive analysis of human nature to bear on the eternally fascinating Italians and their perennially exasperating rules, regulations, and requirements. Here the focus is on his young family: wife Rita and children Michele and Stefania. The author amusingly describes the national obsession with its offspring. In a country with the lowest birthrate in the world (1.3 per family), Italian children are pampered, spoiled, and humored from their very first day of life. For an atheist Englishman, sometimes it all seems too much. It is not only the children who are receiving an Italian education, but Parks himself. Like many others, he discovers, ``The story of my fatherhood has been that of a long strategic retreat from the systems I had hoped to impose.'' In the end, his children will succumb to what has been called Italy's ``fatal charm.'' This seduction can (possibly) be resisted by adults who scorn the cult of the Madonna, stories of statues that weep blood, and the worship of Mamma. But for Michele and Stefi, Italy is part enchanted playland, part elaborate facade, part intricate labyrinth. As many expatriates have discovered, living in Italy can be overwhelmingly complicated; Parks's short chapters chronicle his adventures with the often absurdly contradictory system of laws governing everything from getting a fishing license to buying a home—and his discovery of ways to navigate around them. Small vignettes of life, fragments of society, aphorisms of a people and a culture that add up to a thoroughly enjoyable look underneath Italy's tourist facade.

Pub Date: July 1, 1995

ISBN: 0-8021-1508-X

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Grove

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995

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TO THE ONE I LOVE THE BEST

EPISODES FROM THE LIFE OF LADY MENDL (ELSIE DE WOLFE)

An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.

Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955

ISBN: 0670717797

Page Count: -

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955

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IN MY PLACE

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

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