It’s dangerous dinner party season again. It happens any time that a U.S. story is the headliner. Some Italian fellow guest asks you what, as an American, you think about the current big news item — Iraq, Columbine, November’s election outcome. So you tell them. And then they tell you not only what they know — as an objective Italian — but also that you … Continue reading The America Manual

I covered a lot of ground last summer: N.H., Wis., W. Va., N.C., Ill., Iowa (I cling to the more colorful pre-computer abbreviations). Two themes always strike me during my U.S. travels: How not-American I’ve become and the contrast between my energy and effectiveness levels in America and in Italy. In Italy, I never feel Italian. But going home doesn’t make me feel entirely American, … Continue reading Orario Continuato

I should have been writing this column, but instead, after a long day of cleaning seven decades of dirt and detritus out of my great-grandmother’s summer cottage, I paused for a drink on the deck of Beer n’Bratz in McGregor, Iowa. The Mississippi flowed at my feet. A towboat, sunk low under black mounds of its coal cargo, slid by, its lights aglow like a … Continue reading McGregor, Iowa

If all history were written this well, no one would be condemned to repeat the past. Only twenty years on, the Berlin Wall seems hard to believe; hard to believe that it even came to exist and hard for Cold War children to believe that it came down. Taylor’s book is both comic and tragic: It is comic to read about East Germany’s paranoid and … Continue reading The Berlin Wall: A World Divided, 1961-1989

A bit of history: My grandfather refused to speak to his sister for four years after she voted for FDR. After reading this book, I understand why. Holden Caulfield would have called the inventor of the New Deal and Lend Lease a “phony.” Ever charming and exhaustingly competent, Roosevelt was also chronically prone to strategic “divergence” between word and deed. The book focuses on Roosevelt’s … Continue reading Franklin and Lucy: President Roosevelt, Mrs. Rutherfurd, and the Other Remarkable Women in His Life

It is no surprise that Tom Hanks would agree to star in the movie. A true story, Gill’s story has all the ingredients of a Preston Sturges or Steven Spielberg film. New York is knocked off its pedestal. Hard work, humility and a sense of humor redeem a man and reveal the shallowness of his class assumptions. Gill begins as a New Yorker cartoon caricature: … Continue reading How Starbucks Saved My Life: A Son of Privilege Learns to Live Like Everyone Else

I’m just back from Tajikistan. For a Cold War child, visiting a once-forbidden place was a strong antidote to Milanese and mid-life malaise. Over and over, I was struck by the utter bizarreness of the country’s premise, and its evolution. Take the 19th-century colonial and imperial ambitions of Tsarist Russia; add Marxism (an abstract, European political theory inspired by and maybe only applicable to England’s … Continue reading Dreaming in Tajik

Anyone wondering why Africa is such a mess should read this book, especially those who think that forgiving that misspent debt is all it takes (You too, Bono and sorry for the pun). The title seems cute, until you realize that this truly is a biography. It begins with its subjects birth, Africa’s, geological origins and goes from there. Why did life, human and otherwise … Continue reading Africa: A Biography of the Continent

Exhibit A in the series “There is nothing new under the sun.” If the characters in this book were not so interesting and the intrigue worthy of a Le Carré, this book could really get you down; they’ve been fighting in and around Afghanistan and Pakistan for a long, long time. If you think The First Afghan War means the Soviet invasion in 1979, think … Continue reading The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia

By the time you finish you post-movie pizza, you may almost have forgotten this little Irish film. Who would have thought the day would come when that would be high praise? Making a film free of images that don’t cause post-traumatic stress disorder is now positively counter-cultural. This is a love story without sex, an immigration story without controversy, and a down-home picture without a … Continue reading Once