From immigrant enclave to urban power
The Boston Italians: A Story of Pride, Perseverance, and Paesani, From the Years of the Great Immigration to the Present Day
By Stephen Puleo
Beacon, 323 pp., illustrated, $26.95
Senda Berenson: The Unlikely Founder of Women’s Basketball
By Ralph Melnick
University of Massachusetts, 221 pp., illustrated, paperback, $22.95
The View From Vermont: Tourism and the Making of an American Rural Landscape
By Blake Harrison
University of Vermont, 323 pp., illustrated, paperback, $29.95
In March 1962, after more than a half-century as an influential Italian-language newspaper, La Gazzetta del Massachusetts became the English-language Post-Gazette. As Stephen Puleo explains in "The Boston Italians," " The North End neighborhood, the city, and Boston Italians were changing . It was incumbent upon La Gazzetta to change with them."
Drawing extensively on the files of La Gazzetta as well as the personal papers of its legendary editor and publisher, James V. Donnaruma, and on his own family's memories, Puleo has crafted an unsparing, but mostly admiring, account of a colorful and vibrant community as it battled for social acceptance and political recognition.
Puleo sets the scene with an account of an early -- and unsuccessful -- struggle to change the historic name of North Square to honor George Scigliano, the first Italian-American elected to office in Boston and the second to the Massachusetts Legislature, who died in 1906 at age 31 . He was, writes Puleo, "a hero whose valiant efforts made the New World seem less strange and hostile to Italian immigrants in Boston, and offered hope and encouragement that there was room for them in America."
But, writes Puleo, "in the eyes of the guardians of Boston's Puritanical and Revolutionary legacy, renaming the square to honor an Italian immigrant leader was tantamount to desecrating the venerable site."
Volpe and Bellotti, Menino and DiMasi would come later -- as would Sacco and Vanzetti -- and Puleo treats them all with an understanding view of their respective places in the community's history. And in that history, his own immigrant family holds an emblematic place, one grandfather working as a laborer for some 20 years but with his own produce business by the time he applied for citizenship in 1930, and the other coming as an unskilled laborer but within four years "a talented shoemaker."
And then, in the postwar years, their sons would be moving out to the suburbs. In his parents' case it was to Burlington, prompting their own parents to ask: "Where is it -- how do you get there?"
Ralph Melnick's biography of Senda Berenson is subtitled "The Unlikely Founder of Women's Basketball." A more likely outcome for his subject's life would have been that of a shimmering pre-Raphaelite, a member of the Boston Bohemia set that revolved around Isabella Stewart Gardner and in which Senda's brother, art historian and cultural arbiter Bernard Berenson, was a leading figure.
But when, in her early 20s, chronic back problems ended her dreams of becoming a concert pianist, Senda sought relief and remedy in gymnastics which, in turn, led to the offer of a temporary position as a gymnastics teacher at Smith College. Seeking something for her students that would be a bit more competitive, and fun to play as well, she settled on basketball, which had just been developed at the Springfield YMCA.
The first game, played in bloomers and with a wicker wastebasket in March 1892, was a great success, unveiled "before a full house of screaming spectators" -- all women, as men were barred from the gymnasium during those early games.
Senda remained at Smith for 19 more years, establishing the rules for the game and serving as a tireless advocate for its physical and mental value. It developed, she wrote, that "simultaneous quickness of thought and action, which enables a woman to meet an unexpected situation, perhaps of danger, with alacrity and success."
After the death of her husband, a fellow academic, Senda and her sister Bessie lived in quiet retirement -- summers in New England, winters in Florida, a home in Santa Barbara -- until her death, in 1954.
In "The View From Vermont," geographer Blake Harrison explores the impact of tourism on that upcountry region's image and economy. Harrison's interest is "the nature of work-leisure relations in rural communities like those in Vermont." Its abandoned farmland from the early 1900s on "became a palimpsest on which vacationers inscribed a new rural aesthetic based on leisure and consumption rather than on productive agricultural work."
In a provocative discussion, Harrison explores the relationship between controversial issues, such as sprawl and civil unions, and tourism. Those issues, he writes, owe "at least part of their meaning and resonance to tourism," because tourism exercises "tremendous power over what people think of when they think of a properly ordered rural space."
Just as opponents of sprawl and supporters of civil unions find their views as defining Vermont as "a special place," echoing the message of tourist promoters, those on the other side echo "longstanding arguments about the undue influence of tourists and about tourism's place in the state's economy."
Michael Kenney, a freelance writer living in Cambridge, writes on books of local and regional interest. 