Recent works by alumni and faculty

All in the family

In the past half-dozen years, several memoirs have been published by strong-minded American women of Italian ancestry, including Geraldine Ferraro, Beverly Donofrio, Louise DeSalvo and Diane DiPrima. Now add UConn's Regina Barreca, professor of English and feminist theory, to the list.

In A Sitdown with the Sopranos: Watching Italian American Culture on T.V.'s Most Talked-About Series (Palgrave MacMillan), Barreca offers a superbly entertaining contribution in her essay "Why I Like The Women In The Sopranos Even Though I'm Not Supposed To." Barreca's essay is accompanied by seven noted scholars, writers, critics, and journalists commenting on various aspects of this provocative and successful HBO series.

It's essential to Barreca that all the book's contributors are Italian American, for she holds that it is the voices of this particular ethnic experience that should be at the center of any discussion about

The Sopranos. At the same time, however, she writes that the show "...is not simply or even mostly about issues understood or experienced only by Italian Americans."

In her introduction, Barreca writes that "...to reduce The Sopranos to being a story about violent Italian Americans is like saying that Hamlet is a story about moody Danes. The people who make this argument are not entirely incorrect, but they sure are missing the main point."

The point may well be that once past all the gangster wiles, we get to the meat of the drama of family relationships and human struggles for intimacy, humor, happiness, affection, and success.

With their ethnic roots as the backdrop, each of the five male and three female contributors to the book take on this middle-class suburban crime family, killing off a range of issues from religion to psychotherapy.

On the distaff side, Barreca concedes none of the Soprano women are role models but argues they are indeed "as deadly as the males--in some cases, literally, in other cases, metaphorically."

Barreca's frank and felicitous voice is present as she

reminisces about her own Italian heritage and mulls over why she likes the women in The Sopranos, even though she's, well, not supposed to.

-- Claudia (Gregori) Chamberlain

of this last great-unknown U.S. territory is a first-person account in the voice of one of the crew. They are a motley company of rough frontiersmen, trappers, a newspaper editor, a demented ex-army captain, a teenager, and an overweight Englishman, all led by a one-armed botany professor and ex-army major.

One hundred days later, six half-starved men in two boats emerge at a Mormon camp in Nevada. They have experienced rapids, falls, fire, flood, fights, attempted murder, near drownings, and ambush, all amid vistas of surpassing beauty. In the course of the journey, the crew must not only struggle with the awesome power of the river, but each man also must make an internal and spiritual journey of his own that will change him forever.

UConn Professor Thomas Morawetz has spent more than 30 years mastering the art of teaching law and philosophy. Now he has delved into a very different world: the art of transformation makeup. In his newest, highly readable book, Making Faces, Playing God, Morawetz explores tantalizing questions of identity and the human desire to be transformed.

The glossy book is filled with a before-and-after anthology of actors and their transformed character identities. Morawetz examines the under-appreciated work of makeup artists in movies and their daring work challenging the bounds of identity. His book, based on seven years of research, celebrates the "artist-magicians," as he calls them, who give people that chance to transform into someone else.

Morawetz intends for readers to gain an appreciation for makeup artists as professionals. "Theirs is an art that conceals art," he writes of makeup specialists. "The art form works its magic only because it fools us into accepting what is created as a new and real identity."