A tribute to the Italian American family and its trying bonds of love. “I was born in 1944, but raised in the twelfth century.” With that, Joanna Clapps Herman neatly describes the two worlds she inhabited while growing up as the child of Italian American immigrants in Waterbury, Connecticut, a place embedded with values closer to Homer’s Greece than to Anglo-American New England, where the ethic of hospitality was and still is more Middle Eastern and North African than Anglo-European, and where the pageantry and ritual were more pagan Mediterranean than Western Christian. It was also a place where a stuffed monkey wearing a fedora sat and continues to sit on her grandmother’s piano, and a place where, when the donkey got stubborn and wouldn’t plow the field, her grandfather bit the animal in a fury. In essays filled with wry humor and affectionate yet probing insights, Herman maps and makes palpable the very particular details of this culture—its pride and its shame, its profound loyalty and its Byzantine betrayals. “…[an] eloquently written collection of essays … Herman richly tells about growing up in an environment split between modern suburban surroundings and the Old-World values, customs, and traditions of her deep-rooted Italian family.” — Bronxville-Eastchester Patch “…a haunting, tender, yet unsparing memoir … Herman gives voice to the stories that wouldn’t be told, to those whose stories, told only after their deaths, were unsayable.” — Feile-Festa “[Herman’s] deep love for the Becce and Clapps families and their traditions, as well as her honest dismay of the madness and violence that surfaced in both clans, makes for arresting reading … Herman’s book not only entertains, but also serves as a model for writers who themselves aspire to memoir.” — Connecticut Muse “[Herman’s] tale covers the good and the expected … What sets the book apart from other Italian-theme literature, however, is that [she] also bares many of her family’s failings and serious flaws, shedding light on some dark corners of the family’s past … the book is ground-breaking and commendable. It is a book that goes beyond rosy stereotypes and gets closer to depicting reality. It is a book that all generations of Italian Americans might read and use as a basis for further discussion on what it really means to grow up Italian American.” — CiaoAmerica “…this unique, deeply personal collection of [Herman’s] essays is at once an emotional narrative of her memorable family and also an exploration of the ties between past and present, Italy and America. Herman’s situation is unique, and yet any reader who has experienced what it means to have family ties of any kind can relate to her story.” — Italian American Digest “Joanna Clapps Herman comes to us palms up, arms outstretched, her naked wounds open for the doubtful hand to reach into her riven side. This is the genuine article … She carries us like a tour guide back to her roots, intoxicating us along the way … This kettle of family history boils with the aroma of Old Italy and metropolitan America, savory rich in sorrow and joy, humor and rage.” — San Francisco Book Review “…a rich collection of essays about [Herman’s] huge, brawling Italian-American family, critical yet full of love, respectful yet unsentimental, quietly unsparing.” — New Haven Advocate “The Anarchist Bastard is not just the story of the Clapps and Becce family, but the story of a particular Italian-American way of life in which Herman rejoiced and chafed … The tension between Herman’s love of her family’s intimacy and her own struggle to become an individual apart from that culture ripples through the stories.” — Waterbury Republican-American