Valentino and the Great Italians

Bestsellers

Anthony Valerio's Valentino and the Great Italians is a series of twenty-two essays on some famous and some not-so-famous Italians and Italian-Americans. Blending fact and fiction, myth and reality, the secular and the mundane, and comedy and tragedy, Valerio presents his readers with a kind of Italian "ragtime" of such diverse characters as Rudolph Valentino, Christopher Columbus, Frank Sinatra, Guiseppe Garibaldi, Joe Dimaggio and the Mona Lisa. While one has to sift through each essay to determine the truth, the dream truth, and the operatic truth about his cast of characters, Valerio's knowledge of Italian experience and his scholarship are quite evident. Her really knows both his history and his subject very well. No less important is the fact that he is a first-rate writer who can really tell a good story.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Purporting to offer short biographies of famous Italian-Americans, the text contains minimaland trivialfacts, lost in surrealistic fantasy. Readers will have to wade through practically indecipherable, long-winded passsages to find any logical link to the approximately 20 persons named, including Frank Sinatra, Joe DiMaggio, Giuseppe Garibaldi, Enrico Caruso, Mario Cuomo and Lee Iacocca. Valerio's musings run to sexual recreation (mostly kinky), grotesque bodies, conversations with the Mona Lisa, invented exchanges by various people on improbable subjects, etc. It's hard to imagine any reader staying the course with this hodgepodge. (June