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Rating: 
Summary: A beautiful and engaging journey!
Review: In a very poetic way, Mary invites us on a journey into herItalian-American heritage. We learn first hand, through the writingsof her grandfather, the life of first-generation Italians struggling to make a living in America. I was deeply impressed how Mary is able to see the strengths as well as the human frailties in her family members; in spite of the suffering, there is much to remember and honor. The themes in many ways are universal, and I felt a deep reverence and importance to understanding my own ancestral heritage. I kept having an image of a weaver weaving life currents - her ancestor's stuggles to survive, Mary's life with her violent-tempered father and agoraphobic mother, and her own journey to understanding who she is as a lesbian academic rising beyond the working class - with each individual thread important to the beauty of the tapestry. This book is poet psychology and is must reading for those who search for meaning and importance in their own lives. It is a great read!
Rating: 
Summary: Intelligent and Moving, But Often Opinionated
Review: Mary Cappello's "Nightbloom" presents a poignant and often lyrical portrait of her early life in a working-class Italian-American community. However, she displays a blind spot when casting her gaze towards Sicilian culture. Granted, her Sicilian father was abusive, uneducated and excessively macho, but not all Sicilians have these negative qualities. While most were very poor when they first came to the United States, they brought with them a rich cultural and ethnic heritage with Arab, French, German,Greek, Italian, Jewish, Norman and Spanish roots. Contrary to the popular Mafia stereotype, most came from agrarian backgrounds which nurtured a solid work ethic that enabled them to develop high educational and socioeconomic goals. For this reason, I take issue with Cappello's subtle generalization that most Sicilians are like her father's relatives who jokingly referred to a bust of Giuseppe Verdi as "Joe Green." Most of the second and third generation Sicilians in my large extended family are intelligent upward strivers who would find this denigration of Verdi embarrassing.
Capello rationalizes her own embarrassment about this by claiming that her relatives were engaging in a "parodic" approach to high culture. This is indisputable from the perspective of sophisticated cultural theories that analyze the relationship between "high" and "low" cultures. Yet from another equally valid viewpoint, Cappello's relatives blindly ridiculed an important composer about whom they knew very little. Cappello tries to take a culturally relativistic stance when she says that when she was younger she had "naively" and "studpidly" regarded her Sicilian relatives as less intellectual and "cultured" than other Italian groups. Yet, while she claims to believe that all groups produce their own interesting cultures, she clearly identifies more with her mother's more creatively gifted and intellectually ambitious Neapolitan family. Both Cappello's younger and current self seem to long to participate in the elite culture that many academics in the humanities feign indifference towards, but secretly admire and desire. Capello's stereotypes of Catholicism are as troublesome as her tendency to slight Sicilians. While Catholicism at its worst presents authoritarian and tyrannical priests and nuns who peddle morally narrow attitudes, the Church is based on a rich intellectual tradition that often offers interesting alternative views to mainstream Protestantism. Fascinated by Catholicism's
intellectual coherence and spiritual power, many wealthy New England women from the late nineteenth until the mid-twentieth century shocked their Brahman families by converting to this religion. The nasty, neurotic nuns that Cappello encountered in a Catholic elementary school during the late 1960's, should never have entered the teaching profession. During the 1970's, I had many similarly mean, caustic and bullying teachers in a public elementary school that had progressive pretensions. Many Catholic schools that guided immigrants into the middle class were led by intelligent and sensitive individuals who were far different from those that Cappello describes. Capello's represenation of Catholicism only in terms of its worst elements is not only inaccurate, but provides grist for the mill for those who stereotype this religion as ignorant, irrational and pathological. "Nightbloom" is worth reading because Cappello presents many provocative reflections on her Italian-American experience. Nonetheless, her observations of Sicilian-Americans and Catholicism are often simplistic. For a more compelling discussion of the class issues faced by second and third generation descendents of southern Italians, read Maria Laurino's "Were You Always an Italian: Ancestors and Other Icons of Italian America." Laurino describes in more detail the class issues that upward striving southern Italians have faced and often continue to confront in American society.
Rating:
Summary: An insightful and poetic view of family and self
Review: Ms. Cappello has a rare talent for illuminating the complex -- and bringing out the poetic in the everyday -- nature of family and its effects on self. Her autobiography is an intimate view of her self actualization as a scholar, lesbian, and human being in the contextof her Italian American upbringing. Even though this is a very self directed work, it continues to push the reader to understand his or her own context and self. A very beautiful work.
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