Identity Lessons or Passionate Sage

Identity Lessons: Contemporary Writing about Learning to Be American

Author: Maria Mazziotti Gillan

In stories and poems that explore how our society shapes us, Identity Lessons features a wide array of ethnic perspectives on growing up in America. Leading the reader into the living-rooms, boardrooms, classrooms, and movie houses of America, distinguished writers from all points of the American ethnic landscape shed light on the space between conformity and difference, and examine the struggle between the need to belong and the pull of one's cultural roots. With insight, wit, and poignancy, the contributors to this anthology recall their attempts to reconcile family from the old country with the powerful messages about race, gender and class confronting them in their new surroundings. A collection of superb and moving writing, Identity Lessons deconstructs conceptions of personal and national identity, and forms an indispensable primer for understanding our cultural selves.

Table of Contents:

	Introduction
	Names	3
	Pokeberries	3
	Beets	4
	Magnalia Christi Americana	11
	daughters	13
	fury	13
	Dear Mama	14
	Linked	16
	I Go Back to May 1937	18
	The Portrait	19
	Cracked Portraits	19
	Those Were the Days	21
	The Substitute	22
	The Liar	23
	Daddy, We Called You	39
	Sangre 24: A Legacy	42
	Working Class	43
	from attic	44
	Always Running	45
	Company Outing	47
	Tending	48
	I cannot write a poem to bless all the givers of pain	49
	Family	53
	Why the Violin Is Better	53
	My Aunts	53
	My Son Is Worried About Me	58
	The Word You Did Not Speak	59
	Words for My Daughter from the Asylum	61
	My Mad Son Helps Me Into Heaven	62
	The Children	64
	Mother's Voice	65
	Singing Lessons	65
	photo poem	66
	Saying Farewell to My Father	67
	The Birthday - August 25, 1980	68
	Late	70
	Hotel Nights with My Mother	71
	Legacy	72
	Apples	75
	Day Worker	76
	Breakfast	77
	Shelling Shrimp	78
	The Last Lesson	79
	Poem for My Father	80
	Sports Heroes, Cops, and Lace	82
	The Riddle of Noah	89
	Baptisms	90
	Freedom Candy	91
	The Boots of Alfred Bettingdorf	93
	Say What?	104
	Sangre 14: Sterling, Colorado	105
	The Loss of a Culture	106
	Coffee	107
	Horns on Your Head	107
	The Middle Classes	108
	Right Off the Bat	120
	French Girls Are Fast	126
	My Rough Skinned Grandmother	128
	Kemo Sabe	130
	Dictionary of Terminology	131
	A New Story	132
	The Poets	137
	Seven Horses	138
	The Last Wild Horses in Kentucky	139
	Learning Silence	140
	Home Training	141
	Half-Breed's Song	144
	Mestizo	144
	Tangerine	146
	Between Holi and Halloween	150
	Strange Country	161
	Roomers, rumors	162
	Language Difficulties	163
	The Welcome Table	165
	High School: San Martin	181
	On the Subway	182
	In the Elementary School Choir	185
	Sixth Grade	187
	The Jacket	188
	Ladies' Choice	191
	As Children Together	198
	The Silence That Widened	200
	Caroline	203
	Poem for Anthony, Otherwise Known as Head	204
	from Personal and Impersonal Landscapes	205
	The Dance at St. Gabriel's	206
	Yellow Roses	207
	High School Reunion	208
	The Story of My Life	209
	Wearing of the Green	209
	The Boy Without a Flag	217
	Early Snow	232
	Butch Traynor	233
	The Weird Kid	235
	Sterling Williams' Nosebleed	236
	Losing Faith	238
	Altar Boy	238
	School of Night	239
	No Consolation	239
	The Way of the Cross	241
	Teaching English from an Old Composition Book	245
	Among Children	246
	Our Room	247
	Chinese in Academia	248
	For Sal Sanjamino: On His Retirement	249
	Poem on the First Day of School	250
	Big World, Little Man	251
	A Long Way	251
	The First Day	259
	Pennies	263
	Going to School	264
	Shame	265
	Disc 'n Dat	266
	The Captain of the Safeties	268
	Senior Will	270
	My Father's Love Letters	283
	Mortal Sins	284
	Training Bra	285
	The One Girl at the Boys' Party	286
	The Boy	286
	Practicing	287
	from Drops of This Story	288
	Playing with Dolls	289
	Rice and Beans	291
	Defining Us	291
	Imagining Drag	292
	Choice in Colored Rain	292
	Graffiti	294
	The Girls	295
	Aunt Dorothy	297
	Aunt Rose	298
	The Accordion	299
	Uncle Earl and Guns	302
	Legacy	303
	The Politics of Buddy	303
	"You know what I'm saying?"	305
	The Robe	305
	Acupuncture and Cleansing at Forty-eight	306
	Garden State	311
	Thelonious	312
	Robin's Nest	313
	Real Life	325
	Jetties Were the Bridges I Crossed	326
	Rock'n'Roll	328
	Sally	329
	Painting the Christmas Trees	330
	City Lights	332
	There I Was One Day	333
	An American in Trapani	335
	Made You Mine, America	336
	Ode to Elizabeth	340
	from Krik? Krak!	344
	from This Past Decade and the Next	347
	Second-Grade Angel	349
	Miz Rosa Rides the Bus	350
	The Summer of Black Widows	352
	Tourists	353
	Like Mexicans	355
	American Milk	359
	Contributors	361
	Index	373

Go to: Double Menopause or Discovering Nutrition

Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams

Author: Joseph J Ellis

Here is a fresh look at this astute, likably quirky statesman by a prize-winning biographer. In his new preface, Joseph Ellis discusses why Adams is enjoying a modern-day revival.

Judith Shulevitz

His best book. . . . Ellis's knack for bringing historical figures to life seems to natural you can't imagine him doing anything else. —The New York Times Book Review

Publishers Weekly

Decreeing our second president the ``most misconstrued and underappreciated `great man' in American history,'' Ellis, a history professor at Mount Holyoke College, sets out to recover the Adams legacy obscured by the ``triumph of liberalism.'' His notable study focuses on Adams (1735-1826) in retirement in Quincy, Mass., starting in 1801. Drawing on Adams's correspondence, his journalism and his marginalia in the books he read, Ellis shows the one-term president during his first 12 years of private life fulminating over the country's direction, then mellowing. But Adams would remain oppositional and tart: ``Was there ever a Coup de Theatre that had so great an effect as Jefferson's penmanship of the Declaration of Independence?'' Ellis argues that Adams, incapable of political self-protection and with an insufferable personal integrity, internalized what he viewed as the nation's failings--ambition, lust for distinction, etc.--and struggled to keep a check on such qualities within himself. He and Jefferson differed fundamentally on the meaning of the American Revolution; their disagreement, according to Ellis, was not about means but about ends: Jefferson made ``a religion of the people,'' Adams proposed that democratization should be evolutionary. Photos. (May)

Library Journal

Of all the brilliant cast of characters who brought the United States into being, none is more noteworthy or more controversial than John Adams. In this biography, Ellis (history, Mount Holyoke) focuses on the last part of Adams's life in an attempt to dissect and illuminate the contradictory nature of this great man. In this detailed yet readable account, the reader is told that ``Adams did not just read books. He battled them.'' One of his favorite authors was Bolingbroke, but he considered Voltaire a ``liar.'' A man like Adams is heard loudly through the centuries; collections of his letters will always be invaluable, but Ellis's work is an appropriate and well-researched adjunct to the original sources. Recommended for academic and larger public libraries.-- Katherine Gillen, Mesa P.L., Ariz.