An offer we can't refuse
Subtitle: the Mafia in the mind of America
By: by George De Stefano.
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Published: 2005
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 438
ISBN-13: 9780571211579
Subjects: Mafia -- United States; Italian Americans -- Social conditions
Description: The Mafia has maintained an enduring hold on the American cultural imagination--even as it continues to wrongly color our real-life perception of Italian Americans. Journalist and cultural critic De Stefano takes a look at the origins and prevalence of the Mafia mythos in America. Beginning with a consideration of Italian emigration in the early twentieth century and the fear and prejudice--among both Americans and Italians--that informed our earliest conception of what was the largest immigrant group to enter the United States, De Stefano explores how these impressions laid the groundwork for the images so familiar to us today and uses them to illuminate and explore the variety and allure of Mafia stories. At the same time, he addresses the lingering power of the goodfella cliché, which makes it all but impossible to green-light a project about the Italian American experience not set in gangland.--From publisher description.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Italians to Italian Americans; title: The Mafia; title: A genre is born; title: Don Corleone was my grandfather; title: From mean streets to suburban meadow; title: Act like a man; title: Moulanyans, Medigahns, and wonderbread wops; title: Cultural holocaust or national myth?