Beyond Godfather: Italian American Writers on Real Italian American Experience. A. Kenneth Ciongoli and Jay Parini, Editors. Hanover and London: The UP of New England, 1997. xiv. 320 pages. Beyond Godfather collects memoirs with essays on literature and culture, all by Italian-Americans, most of them professors of literature. While my guess is that most readers will pick up book for memoirs, they may be quite disappointed until they get past them and into better written and, surprisingly, more personally engaging essays in literary criticism. After reading Beyond Godfather, I realized, like contributors whose surnames mask their heritage, that I would have to explain my credentials for writing about a book on the real Italian American Like them, I am a second generation American, but my ethnicity was mixed at my parents' marriage, not mine: my father's parents came from Ireland, my mother's from Italy. My Irish grandparents lived near us, but my Italian grandmother lived with us; for most of my childhood, she slept in bedroom next to mine. From that vantage point, she exerted enormous influence. She heard my night prayers and guided me to ask God's blessing on all my relatives, Italian and Irish. She introduced me to mysteries of making marinara and rolling gnocchi. She taught me to sing Italian operas and Italian lullabies, and she made sure I knew when saints I learned about at school, Francesca Cabrini, John Bosco, Dominic Savio, not to mention my patron saint, Francis of Assisi, were not just Catholic but also Italian. We lived in a city (Newport, Rhode Island) whose primary ethnic groups were Irish and Portuguese, but we were close enough to vibrant Italian-American enclaves like Federal Hill in Providence and South End in Boston never to feel cut off from other Italians. Even as a young girl, I was aware of events in my life and in world from a dual perspective: I knew that Irish Catholics and Italian Catholics thought differently about authority of priests, discipline of nuns, integrity of local politicians, infallibility of Pope, and virtues of a Catholic President. Perhaps because I grew up in a household that was American working class and multi-ethnic, some of experiences recorded in Beyond Godfather do not ring true as examples of Italian-American experience. For instance, with a few remarkable exceptions, stories of displacement seem less about disparities between Italian-American and mainstream culture than between working class and middle class cultures. Irish-Americans, Polish-Americans, and other ethnic Americans tell same stories when theirs has been generation to move out of working class and into a system whose work ethic, family relationships, and social connections are so different from their parents'. Likewise, narratives that recount struggles to separate from crippling ethnic stereotypes seem not so much Italian as ethnic. These stories might belong to Polish, Slovakian, Vietnamese, Korean, African, and Italian-Americans. Typically, memoirs are richly detailed and evocative, albeit strangely conflicted; many seem both emotionally remote and self-indulgent. A few essays sound forced, as if writers had never considered their ethnicity important until it offered them opportunity to write for this collection. Despite inclusive title, all memoirs were written by academics, and by professors of literature at that. I wonder if it is really that difficult to find Italian-Americans working in other academic disciplines or areas outside of academe. The most powerful and compelling memoirs in Beyond Godfather take personal experience and make it both universal and political, or recognize something worth synthesizing (even when doing so is painful), worth reincorporating and passing along to others. …