Larry Abbott, 75, a widower and retired English teacher, takes a two-week tour of Italy and Sicily in the spring of 2002, hoping to visit his mother's grave in Palermo after two earlier attempts since 1990 failed.

Memoirs of a Gloucester Fisherman is one man’s story of a lifetime spent seafaring out of Gloucester – a personal record, an intimate summing-up, of unusual candor and strength. At the same time, Salve Testaverde’s account represents an important document in the history of commercial fishing over the past fifty years. In the span of his working life, which began in 1931 on his father’s boat, R. Salve Testaverde has seen the coastal fishery of New England change, and adapt to change, relentlessly. The story of his career traces the ups and downs of the Gloucester fleet as shifting market conditions and developing technology challenge its men to adapt and survive. But Memoirs of a Gloucester Fisherman is also a story of the love between a woman and a man, of a marriage that flourished through the hardships and uncertainties of the Depression, the War, and, of his wife and the home she made for her family brings us deep inside the man himself – his doubts, his joys, his ways with the people he loves. Just as indelibly, we see the Testaverdes against the sharply drawn backdrop of Gloucester’s fishing community. In scenes of extraordinary vitality, Salve Testaverde describes the daily life of the Fort neighborhood as it was in the ‘20s; the first of the famous fiestas in honor of St. Peter; the competition and especially the camaraderie among the men of the fleet, culminating in their triumphant cooperative effort to create the Fisherman’s Wharf. In Salve Testaverde’s song of himself, we hear the true voice of a community and a way of life. Memoirs of a Gloucester Fisherman is an unforgettable book.

SOCIAL SCIENCE Hidden in the hollows of the Madonie Mountain in North Central Sicily are villages where roads and electricity arrive years after appearing in cities and towns. This is a place where the inhabitants are descended from a long line of serfs who were in bondage to a feudal lord and for whom aspects of feudal culture continue to be transmitted by elders to their children. From one such village, Lucia and Dominico D’Anna emigrated to Manhattan’s Lower East Side where author Jo Danna was born. Years later, anthropologist Margaret Mead sent Danna to that village to do her doctoral research. This was a time when winds of change from the modern world were beginning to upset the harmony of a community still rooted in the Middle Ages, where sons and daughters were pitted against elders trying vainly to preserve their ancient traditions, where arranged marriages persist. An example is her Sicilian aunt’s attempts to protect her virtue and the family honor by insisting that she be chaperoned everywhere. The Sicilian Project provides an enchanting, personal look at how rapid culture change splits apart generations and social classes. Efforts of today’s Sicilians to remove an unwanted outcome of medieval times, the Mafia, are also described.

When career-girl Veronica flies to Sicily for a friend's wedding, she accidentally falls in love with one of the groom's three-hundred cousins. A year later she has given up her job, house and friends, and is planning her own wedding with her Latin Lover in the shimmering heat of Sicily.

With the nation at war in the 1940s, 22-year-old Jack Valenti flew combat in Italy. He was in that fateful Dallas motorcade in 1963, flew back to Washington with the new president, and for three years worked in the inner circle of the White House as special assistant to President Johnson. Then, for the next 38 years, with American society and popular culture undergoing a revolutionary transformation, Valenti was the public face of Hollywood in his capacity as head of the Motion Picture Association of America. From growing up poor in a neighborhood of Greek and Italian immigrants in Houston to rising to the highest summits both of national government and Hollywood, Valenti has led several lives. Here is a candid reflection of the life of a brilliantly successful man who helped to shape politics and entertainment in the second half of the twentieth century.

Martin Scorsese's current position in the international film community is unrivaled, and his name has become synonymous with the highest standards of filmmaking excellence. He is widely considered America's best living film director, and his Taxi Driver and Raging Bull appear frequently on worldwide surveys of the best films of all time. Here, in the first biographical account of this artist's life, Vincent LoBrutto traces Scorsese's Italian-American heritage, his strict Catholic upbringing, the continuing role of religion in his life and art, his obsessive love of cinema history, and the powerful impact that the streets of New York City had on his personal life and his professional career. Meanwhile, the filmmaker's humble, soft-spoken public persona tells only part of the story, and LoBrutto will delve into the other side of a complex and often tortured personality. Scorsese's intense passion, his private relationships, his stormy marriages, and his battles with drugs and depression are all chronicled here, and, in many cases, for the first time. In addition, the book includes an interview with the director, as well as filmographies cataloging his work as a director, producer, actor, and presenter. As his Best Director award at the 2007 Oscars clearly demonstrated, Scorsese has become something like Hollywood royalty in recent years, finally enjoying the insider status and favor that eluded him for most of his career. But these recent developments aside, Scorsese is also notable as a distinctly American type of artist, one whose work-created in a medium largely controlled by commercialism and marketing-has always been unmistakably his own, and who thus remains a touchstone of artistic integrity in American cinema. In Martin Scorsese: A Biography, readers can examine not only the work of one of the form's genuine artists, but also the forces that have propelled the man behind it.

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This volume presents fifty-five stories, newly translated, of the hundred novelle that comprise Boccaccio’s masterpiece. Winner of the 2014 PEN USA Literary Award for Translation This Norton Critical Edition includes: · Fifty-five judiciously chosen stories from Wayne A. Rebhorn’s translation of The Decameron. · Introductory materials and explanatory footnotes by Wayne A. Rebhorn, along with three maps. · Biographical works by Filippo Villani and Ludovico Dolce along with literary studies by Francesco Petrarca, Andreas Capellanus, and Boccaccio. · Eleven critical essays, including those by Giuseppe Mazzotta, Millicent Marcus, Teodolinda Barolini, Susanne L. Wofford, Luciano Rossi, and Richard Kuhns. · A Chronology and a Selected Bibliography.