Overview

"A MASTERPIECE OF LITERARY MEMORY--A POWERFUL EXPLORATION OF THE INTERSECTIONS OF FAMILY, HISTORY, AND MEMORY. ""One evening in May 1948, my mother went to a party in New York with her first husband and left it with her second, my father."" So begins the passionate and stormy union of Mikhail Kamenetzki, aka Ugo Stille, one of Italy's most celebrated journalists, and Elizabeth Bogert, a beautiful and charming young woman from the Midwest. Their immediate attraction and tumultuous marriage is part of a much larger story: the mass migration of Jews from fascist-dominated Europe in the 1930s and in the shadow of World War II. It is the story of a crucial, painful moment in history that reshaped much of American culture and society--but also that of two seemingly incongruous people who managed to find love. Theirs was an uneasy marriage between Europe and America, between Jew and Wasp; their differences were a key to their bond yet a source of constant strife. Acclaimed author and frequent New Yorker contributor Alexander Stille's The Force of Things is a powerful, beautifully written work with the intimacy of a memoir, the pace and readability of a novel, and the historical sweep and documentary precision of nonfiction writing at its best. It is a portrait of people who are buffeted about by large historical events, who try to escape their origins but find themselves in the grip of the force of things."

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9781250043580

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Reviews

[Stille] leaves us not just with extraordinarily powerful portraits of these terribly mismatched individuals but also with a deeply felt understanding of how they were shaped. --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times Stille uses the domestic drama as a starting point for a sweeping narrative that blends memoir, history, and psychology, and spans generations and continents....Moving effortlessly between the intimate and the grand, Stille shows how our lives acquire meaning. -- The New Yorker [A] richly detailed narrative... The Force of Things maps a complex family tree, tracing a lavish cultural history through each branch and twig. -- Oprah.com

<p> Why should readers care about a pair of strangers' bad marriage? . . . The thing is, in The Force of Things A Marriage In War and Peace, their son brings to their story not only a sense of filial puzzlement and emotion, but also the narrative verve of a novelist combined with the unflinching eye of a seasoned journalist. In [Stille's] capable hands, their distressing tale of marital woe becomes a fascinating psychological study of two people with complicated family pasts, trying to forge identities of their own--two people with utterly different views and experiences of history . . . It is Mr. Stille's determination to use his skills as a reporter to flesh out his family's history that lends this book its depth of field and emotional ballast . . . He leaves us not just with extraordinarily powerful portraits of these terribly mismatched individuals, but also with a deeply felt understanding of how they were shaped. --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times <p> <br> In The Force of Things, his richly detailed narrative of his parents' long, troubled union, Alexander Stille sifts through voluminous interviews and archives to conjure a couple--and a world--in the throes of change . . . The Force of Things maps a complex family tree, tracing a lavish cultural history through each branch and twig . . . The prose here is diamond-cut, evoking the glitter of a turbulent century--a son's homage to the triumphs and disappointments of two flawed, memorable people. --Hamilton Cain, O: The Oprah magazine <br> Wonderful . . . Stille has the confidence to write about his parents as flawed human beings, with a minimum of blame or recrimination. He also has the historical imagination to evoke their very different backgrounds with equal vividness . . . As The Force of Things shows, the best memoirs transcend solipsism to become genuine histories of unknown lives. <p>--Adam Kirsch, Tablet <br> Stille paints a portrait that is as expansive as it is attentive

Author Information

Alexander Stille is the author of Excellent Cadavers: The Mafia and the Death of the First Italian Republic, Benevolence and Betrayal, and The Future of the Past. He is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Times.

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