💾 Archived View for gemini.hearsay.tech › 2024-12-03-unto-the-sons.gmi captured on 2024-12-17 at 10:05:50. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
A few months ago, I stole a book from a local WeWork named "Unto the Sons" by Gay Talese. Written in the early 1990s, it was described in contemporary reviews as "Roots for Italians." This appealed to me a lot.
I finally got to it a few days ago, and just finished last night. It was very engaging, and I related a lot to it, although I feel like it was probably written for my parents.
Here are a few sections I liked: The first two are short, the third is long.
He had been reared among pessimists, mystics, people shaped by earthquakes, plagues, and other calamities beyond their control. Nothing was a sure thing in his village, nothing could be counted on. Maida was a warm, bright place in the mountains where nobody truly saw the sun. People wore black there when they had nothing to mourn. They mourned in advance. In that place, the most casual of compliments could be construed as a curse.
Susan become an information operator... the operators were trained to speak in staccato sound bites, to enunciate, ee-nun-cee-ate, the numbers in such a way that "four" sounded like "fo-wer," and "five" was "fy-yiv," and "seven" was "sev-ven," and "nine" was "ny-yen." Not only numbers, but the language in general was enunciated in this exaggerated manner by the operators, even when they were off duty at home with their families; and the di Paola family in Brooklyn, thanks to the syllabicating Susan, had another dialect added to the household, the Bell-induced dialect that she passed on to her younger sisters and brother, who began calling her "Su-Zand."
At thirty-nine, Benito Mussolini became the youngest premier in the nation's history. He achieved this not because he was truly powerful but because he had convinced the king and the parliamentarians that he was, and therefore he *was*. Whether he was an egomaniacal buffoon, as some politicians privately believed, or a ruthless, demented tyrant, as others thought, he was effective in establishing doubt and fear in those who differed with him, a feat made all the more attainable since his opposition now consisted mainly of men who were weak, worried, and willing to accept any leader if it was hinted that they might continue their employment in the government. For a while, Mussolini had duped them into thinking that he would welcome diverse opinions and coalitions, just as he had earlier manipulated the king into believing that to oppose Fascism was to invite a bloody left-wing revolution that would topple the monarchy.
Most of the nation's business leaders saw in Mussolini's appointment the enhancement of their own interests—an auspicious future with more tax concessions, fewer strikes, smaller state bureaucracies, less zeal directed toward the breakup of large estates; a possible termination of rent controls, a reduction in unemployment relief, and fewer annoying inquiries concerning war profits and tax evasion. That Mussolini lacked experience as a government leader was also interpreted by many businessmen as an asset, for in recent years the most experienced leaders had committed the greatest blunders. And the Mussolini who in 1919 was condemning priests and advocating the confiscation of ecclesiastical property would be announcing through his controlled press in the mid-1920s that he was a "profoundly religious man" eager to enforce religious instruction in schools and universities, and to increase state subsidies to priests and bishops... the sale and distribution of contraceptives would be not only a sin against the Church but a crime against the state.