italy memoir

Softcover. Ashland OR, Hellgate Press, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 230 pages, b&w illustrations. Italy, July 1944. The unendurable insult to Italy's inherently genial way of life brought about by Hitler's storm-troopers and Mussolini's Fascist toadies was both taking its toll on the people of Italy and creating a fledgling underground Resistance movement whose heroic ranks would soon swell to nearly 200,000 brave men and women. Author Leon Weckstein was there--an American GI in combat fighting with and befriending the Partisans. Here is the story, as told through eyewitness accounts and carefully researched historical archives, of the Italian Partisans and their American OSS allies' battle to destroy the Nazi-Fascist regime and expel the culprits from their beloved Italy. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. NY, Arno Press, reprint, 1969, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, blue cloth with gilt decoration and lettering. A reprint of the 1927 edition published by J.M. Dent in London. Bright, clean copy.

Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 2013, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 120 pages. Like new in publisher's shrink-wrap. A glimpse inside the mind and artistic process of a fascinating contemporary cartoonist. Born to working-class parents in a small town in Italy, and reared in Chicago, Ivan Brunetti (b. 1967) was drawn to cartoons and comic strips from an early age. Finding inspiration in Spider-Man and Peanuts, he began crafting his own stories and gradually developed a unique style that he applied to imaginative, sometimes shocking subjects. The dark humor of his graphic novels earned him a cult following, yet his illustrations have had broad appeal. Now recognized as an award-winning cartoonist and illustrator, Brunetti has published his work in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, and McSweeney's, among others.

Hardcover. New Haven , Yale University Press, 1st, 2013, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 120 pages. Like new in publisher's shrink-wrap. A glimpse inside the mind and artistic process of a fascinating contemporary cartoonist. Born to working-class parents in a small town in Italy, and reared in Chicago, Ivan Brunetti (b. 1967) was drawn to cartoons and comic strips from an early age. Finding inspiration in Spider-Man and Peanuts, he began crafting his own stories and gradually developed a unique style that he applied to imaginative, sometimes shocking subjects. The dark humor of his graphic novels earned him a cult following, yet his illustrations have had broad appeal. Now recognized as an award-winning cartoonist and illustrator, Brunetti has published his work in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, and McSweeney's, among others.

Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 2013, Book: Very Good, Hardcover, 120 pages. A glimpse inside the mind and artistic process of a fascinating contemporary cartoonist. Born to working-class parents in a small town in Italy, and reared in Chicago, Ivan Brunetti (b. 1967) was drawn to cartoons and comic strips from an early age. Finding inspiration in Spider-Man and Peanuts, he began crafting his own stories and gradually developed a unique style that he applied to imaginative, sometimes shocking subjects. The dark humor of his graphic novels earned him a cult following, yet his illustrations have had broad appeal. Now recognized as an award-winning cartoonist and illustrator, Brunetti has published his work in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, and McSweeney's, among others.

Atgen PA, Schiffer, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 144 pages illustrated in color and b&w. In 1942, Ed Vebell landed with the US Army in North Africa and was recruited by Stars & Stripes, the US armed forces newspaper, as their official staff artist. Daily, he drew illustrations and reported on the progress of World War II throughout Europe. This book offers a selection of his sketches, drawings, paintings, and photographs from that time, and presents one artist's view of the war from North Africa, through the campaigns in Italy, France, and Germany. After the war, the author spent two weeks with the Russians in Berlin, and was then assigned as the courtroom artist during the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials. Along the way are Ed's reminiscences about such personalities as famed war correspondent and artist Bill Mauldin, singers Josephine Baker and Edith Piaf, Charles de Gaulle, Gen. Teddy Roosevelt Jr., and many others. Ed also reminisces about his two years photographing backstage at the Folies Bergere in Paris, as well as his time as an Olympic fencer. Clean copy.

Softcover. Wesleyan University Press, reprint, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 166 pages. This book, first published in Italy in 1988 as Autoritratto di gruppo, documents the intricate web of individual and communal experiences in the political movements of the '60s. Luisa Passerini, internationally known for her work in memory, oral history, and their intersections with social movements, sets out to rescue the "forgotten memory" of her generation and to give it literary status. The year 1968 is symbolic in Italy of a whole decade of struggles by students, women, workers, intellectuals, and technicians. Framed and illuminated by sessions of psychoanalysis, this absorbing narrative weaves episodes of Passerini's autobiography - including her involvement in the 1968 uprisings - oral histories of other participants, and Passerini's sociological observations. It raises critical questions about how we reconstruct the past and vividly illustrates the forces that shaped a generation. Clean copy.

Softcover. NY, Bellevue Literary Press, 1st, 2007, Softcover, 236 pages. Without awkwardness we would not know grace, stability, or balance. Yet no one before Mary Cappello has turned such a penetrating gaze on this misunderstood condition. Fearlessly exploring the ambiguous borders of identity, she mines her own life journeys from Russia to Italy to the far corners of her heart and the depths of a literary or cinematic text to decipher the powerful messages that awkwardness can transmit. Clean copy.

Hardcover. US, Bulfinch , 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 264 pages includes index. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. A graceful, lively memoir by photography's first historian, with accounts of his friendships with many of the century's great photographers, from Alfred Stieglitz to Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, and Henri Cartier-Bresson. Newhall (1908-93) wrote the now-standard History of Photography (1937) and founded the photo collection at the Museum of Modern Art; as much as anyone, he helped photography gain acceptance as art. This memoir, finished shortly before his death, includes an account of his boyhood in Lynn, Massachusetts; of his training in art history at Harvard; the important early exhibits he organized at the MOMA; and the contributions of his wife, Nancy, to both the field and his own accomplishments. A long section describing his work as a photoreconnaisance expert in Egypt and Italy during WW II, though not closely related to his career, is also highly interesting. In addition, Newhall offers detailed accounts of various important photographers' working methods, as well as of discussions carried on among them about their work.

Softcover. Philadelphia, Paul Dry Books, 1st US, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 326 pages. In an extraordinary literary debut, Aldo Zargani reconstructs the lost world of his Jewish childhood during the perilous years 1938-45 when he and his family fled from Fascists and Nazis in northern Italy. His haunting memoir acquires a cinematic intensity as he crosscuts from the blood-red stone spires of Basel, where his father failed to find refuge for his family in 1939, to fiery scenes of the Allied bombing of Turin in 1942, to the freezing winter of 1943-44, which Zargani and his brother spent hidden in a Catholic boarding school deep in the countryside.

Hardcover. Rhinebeck NY, Epigraph Books, 1st, 2020, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 437 pages, b&w illustrations. Leslie Armstrong's memoir is a delightful reading experience about growing up on New York's Upper East Side and becoming one's own woman. Whether relating life in an exclusive private school, working as a clerk at Harrod's in London, or apprenticing to renowned artists at Italy's Spoleto Festival, this intrepid girl remains always her determined self. Her occasional instances of naivete make it easy to identify with the exceptional life she has lead. Clean copy.

Softcover. New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 137 pages, light blue wrappers. An uncorrected proof. The subtle portrait of a great but difficult man and a legendary island. When friends die, one's own credentials change: one becomes a survivor. Graham Greene has already had biographers, one of whom has served him mightily. Yet I hope that there is room for the remembrance of a friend who knew him-not wisely, perhaps, but fairly well-on an island that was "not his kind of place," but where he came season after season, year after year; and where he, too, will be subsumed into the capacious story.

Hardcover. Boston, David R Godine, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 99 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Very clean, unmarked copy with only minor edgewear. Black and white images throughout. These letters were written between 1950 and 1964 as Lebrun moved between the United States, Mexico and Italy and provide a glimpse into the artist's thoughts during that period.

Hardcover. Boston, David R Godine, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 99 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Very clean, unmarked copy with only minor edgewear. Black and white images throughout. These letters were written between 1950 and 1964 as Lebrun moved between the United States, Mexico and Italy and provide a glimpse into the artist's thoughts during that period.

Hardcover. Boston, Little Brown, 1st, 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 287 pages, 442 b&w illustrations. The famous photojournalist presents, among other events, the abdication of Edward VIII; the Anschluss; the Warsaw ghetto, before and after its destruction; Tito's guerrilla war against the Nazis; and Isr'l's battle for independence. He recorded the fall of Hungary to the Communists; he was with Churchill at Teheran; and with Khrushchev at Belgrade. There are also exotic parties given by Cecil Beaton and Lady Juliet Duff. Portraits of the last glories of the English aristocracy and the old French Bourgeoisie; the industrialists and artists who made Italy's miraculous postwar recovery possible. In 60,000 words of text he captures the extraordinary adventures and bizarre characters that together made up the author's life. The combination of words and pictures provides a rich, powerful portrait of a fascinating career. Missing dust jacket.

Hardcover. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 202 pages. Natalia Ginzburg, arguably the most important woman writer of postwar Italy, always spoke of herself with irrepressible modesty. Yet the woman who claimed she "never managed to climb up mountains" in fact wrote the history of twentieth-century Italy with her sparse and captivating prose, chronicling Fascism, war, and the Nazi occupation as well as the intimacies of family life. Intensely reserved, Ginzburg said that she "crept toward autobiography stealthily like a wolf." But she did openly discuss her life and her work in an extraordinary series of interviews for Italian radio in 1990. Never before published in English, It's Hard to Talk about Yourself presents a vivid portrait of Ginzburg in her own words on the forces that shaped her remarkable life-politics, publishing, literature, and family. This fluid translation will join Ginzburg's autobiography, Family Sayings, as one of the most important records of her life and, as the editors write in their preface, "the last, unexpected, original book by Natalia Ginzburg."

Hardcover. New York, Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 272 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. SIGNED BY MICHAEL TUCKER AND JILL EIKENBERRY (Author dedicated book to wife, Jill) on title page. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket.

Softcover. Merrick NY, Cross-Cultural Communications, 1st pbk, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 48 pages. Edited and translated from the Italian by Stanislao G. Pugliese. Ignazio Silone, anti-fascist and founding member of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) offers a politically conscious and soul searching memoir which details his own PSI activities and the various factors engendering the "necessity for action on behalf of liberty and democracy among the working classes." Over the course of his political career, Silone wrote a number of fiction and non-fiction works, and was imprisoned in Italy, France, Spain, and finally in Switzerland where he composed this memoir in 1942. Often compared with Andre Malraux and Albert Camus, Silone was awarded an honorary degree by Yale University, was a recipient of the Jerusalem Prize, and was twice considered for the Nobel Prize in Literature. INSCRIBED BY PUGLIESE on the title page. Clean copy.

Softcover. NY, Seven Stories Press, reprint, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 431 pages. A fascinating document of an extraordinary life, Memoirs of A Breton Peasant reads with the liveliness of a novel and bristles with the vigor of an opinionated autodidact from the very lowest level of peasant society. Brittany during the nineteenth century was a place seemingly frozen in the Middle Ages, backwards by most French standards; formal education among rural society was either unavailable or dismissed as unnecessary, while the church and local myth defined most people's reasoning and motivation. Jean-Marie Deguignet is unique not only as a literate Breton peasant, but in his skepticism for the church, his interest in science, astronomy and languages, and for his keen--often caustic--observations of the world and people around him. Born into rural poverty in 1834, Deguignet escapes Brittany by joining the French Army in 1854, and over the next fourteen years he fights in the Crimean war, attends Napoleon III's coronation ceremonies, supports Italy's liberation struggle, and defends the hapless French puppet emperor Maximilian in Mexico. He teaches himself Latin, French, Italian and Spanish and reads extensively on history, philosophy, politics, and literature. He returns home to live as a farmer and tobacco-seller, eventually falling back into dire poverty. Throughout the tale, Deguignet's freethinking, almost anarchic views put him ahead of his time and often (sadly, for him) out of step with his contemporaries. Deguignet's voluminous journals (nearly 4,000 pages in total) were discovered in a farmhouse in Brittany a century after they were written. This narrative was drawn from them and became a surprise bestseller when published in France in 1998. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin , 1st, 1950, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, putty color cloth stamped in red and blue, 277 pages. To write this, his third book, the author lived in Sicily itself for several months on a Guggenheim Fellowship. There he found the humor and romance, the places and the people that figured in the legends of his childhood. During his extensive travel on the island, he also discovered some of the realities of post-war and post-fascism reconstruction. Mild shelf wear, dust jacket flaps laid in.

Softcover. Madison WI, University of Wisconsin Press., reprint, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 254 pages. This is the life story of Rosa Cavalleri, an Italian woman who came to the United States in 1884, one of the peak years in the nineteenth-century wave of immigration. A vivid, richly detailed account, the narrative traces Rosa's life in an Italian peasant village and later in Chicago. Marie Hall Ets, a social worker and friend of Rosa&;s at the Chicago Commons settlement house during the years following World War I, meticulously wrote down her lively stories to create this book. Clean copy.

Softcover. NY, Bordighera Press , 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 97 pages. Bilingual Edition in English and Italian. INSCRIBED BY THE TRANSLATOR, Laura Ruberto. "An immigrant woman's moving account of what one gains, but also what one loses, when emigrating to the U.S. from a village in rural Campania. All those who have been uprooted from their homes can identify with this Southern Italian woman's life story--marked by acceptance of hardship and the poetic memory of the village in which she was born and to which she could not bear to return". Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. NY, Horizon Press, 1st, 1967, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 264 pages with index. Carnevali, an Italian poet, came to the USA, suffered poverty and illness, and returned to Italy. Some of his poems are included here. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, E. P. Dutton, 1st, 1919, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, blue cloth covers with gilt lettering, 402 pages. Translated form the Italian by Maria Sermolino. An account of WW1 by an officer in the Italian Army. Clean, tight copy.