La bell' America From La Rivoluzione to the Great Depression: An Italian Immigrant Family Remembered is a blend of world history and family memoir, following how one Italian-American family was pushed out of their native country by political unrest and searched for their dreams in America - despite poverty, prejudice, and the Great Depression. An epic journey spanning generations in the 19th and 20th centuries, La bell' America reveals both the light and dark side of adapting to American culture, and offers a wealth of perspective and pragmatic thoughts concerning the evolution of modern history. An excellent and thought-provoking read from cover to cover.

--Midwest Book Review, December 9, 2009

Five generations of Italian immigrants carry on a love affair with America in this sprawling, exuberant memoir. Graziano's narrative, padded with reams of invented dialogue, stretches back to his 19th-century ancestors in the Italian village of Maida, a semifeudal society whose rigid class hierarchy and hopeless poverty are reinforced by a church-inculcated fatalism. (The author's anticlericalism is pronounced.) But for those with gumption, America beckons: a harsh but dynamic place where opportunities abound despite anti-Italian bigotry. The story gradually refocuses on Graziano's lush reminiscences of his Depression-era boyhood in Nyack, N.Y., where his family weathered hard times thanks to clan solidarity and his father's Herculean work ethic. The author includes iconic vignettes of steerage and arrival, lengthy digressions on Italian history and sociological exegeses of the ways in which immigrants adapted Italy's peasant culture to America, along with novelistic domestic scenes—family dinners, street vendors, wash-day rituals—that are almost Proustian in their detail. The book is a bit schmaltzy and sometimes feels like an overstuffed photo album full of rose-colored stories about half-remembered cousins, but its evocations of family life make it a rich study of the immigrant adventure. Photos. (Dec.)

--Publishers Weekly, September 28, 2009

 Graziano's beautifully written book evokes a time long-gone, his childhood as the American-born son of Italian immigrants. Many of his descriptions are universal for all immigrants starting at the bottom of the economic ladder, trying to become part of the U.S.A., the land of opportunity. Throughout he details lovingly the special ways that the Italian families and community in a small town in La Bell'America lived, worked hard, maintained strong family ties, and sustained themselves, even during the depths of the 1930s depression. While not a sociologist, Graziano writes in the tradition of C. Wright Mills who defined the field as existing in the intersection between history and biography. The author provides a social history of Italy, which he deftly interweaves with the story of his family going back several generations in their Italian Village; the history clarifies the tremendous emigration from Italy during the 19th and early 20th centuries. This is a very enjoyable read, suitable for the general reader and for students of history, sociology, and ethnic studies.

--Adeline Levine, Ph.D. Author of "Love Canal: Science, Politics, and People"; and  (with Murray Levine) "Helping Children: A Social History"

The reader of this book will learn much about Italy, Italian immigrants, and America, but most importantly the reader will get to know Anthony Graziano - his intelligence, his humor, his attention to detail and his deep feeling for the people whose story he tells. The experience of that extended family, a family that quickly embraces the reader, is at the heart of this account of the people whose unique spirit comes to life in the pages of this remarkable book.

--Jack D'Amico, Author of "The Family, La Famiglia"; "The Moor in English Renaissance Drama"; and "Shakespear and Italy"

Anthony Graziano's La bell' America is a study of the lives of Italian-American immigrants from the 1800's through the 1920's. Graziano brings to life his family, relatives and their friends, and tells their stories in first and second-hand accounts of their lives.  It is rare today to find this kind of historical data.  Most of the people so vividly described have disappeared but their stories are here, for us. La Bell'America is a tapestry of history, biography, personal reminiscence and volumes of lessons that we should learn because, as the author says, "we are all immigrants."

--Michael Giallombardo, Associate Producer: La Terra Promessa, A Documentary of immigrants to Western New York 

This is a big book.  It is much more than the subtitle, Reminiscences of an Italian Family in the 1930s indicates.  It is both a sweeping narrative of European and American history, and a lovingly-crafted reminiscence of the Dattilo and Graziano families told in the voice of their precocious American grandson.  The two narratives touch as the families are impacted by the forces of revolution, world wars, and economic depression, and then part as the author returns to the details of life in the small Italian town of Maida and the transition to La Bell’ America.  The story reminds us that immigration was not a one-way passage.  What began with migrant workers supporting their impoverished families at home was made permanent by their sons and daughters.  It was their children, the “second generation” who finalized the process and became Americans.   As the continuing interplay between the New World and the old also reminds us, immigration impacted on and, in its own way, “Americanized” their Italian homes as well.
            Graziano is a very good story- teller. I was fascinated by the seamless movement between first- and third-person narration, between a tone of righteous indignation over the havoc played on the lives of people by political and economic forces beyond their control and a personal, reflective and often humorous one, between broad historical and sociological conceptualizations and the smallest of details.  I also appreciate Graziano’s insight and sensitivity to issues of gender, class and ethnicity.  There is something in this book for everyone, not least of which is a very good read. 

--Joan M. Crouse, Ph.D.  Professor of History, Hilbert College, author of The homeless transient in the Great Depression: New York State, 1929-1941.

La bell'America is a memoir drawn from the Italian immigrant experience. The author, a renowned psychologist and professor emeritus born to Italian immigrants, skillfully interweaves his childhood memories into a well-researched historical context. Graziano explores his heritage through his ancestors' roots, reconstructing their difficult lives as they struggled to prosper in impoverished southern Italy and following the family as it emigrated to the northeastern United States in the 1920s. The author's own recollections flesh out the portrait of the family members as they worked, often in the face of prejudice, to ensure the future success of their children. La bell'America carries the reader through the family's pitfalls and triumphs as they face challenging social and economic conditions, and it does so with both affection and a touch of humor. But while it is a personal work in one sense, it also shares and celebrates universal experiences. It appeals not only to the countless Americans who share in the immigrant experience, either first-hand or through their ancestry, but also to those interested in gaining an understanding of the forces that drove countless Italians to emigrate to the United States at the turn of the last century. This was a journey I was happy to to embark upon and follow through from beginning to end.

--Julia Cozzarelli, PhD, Professor of Italian Literature, Ithaca College