Product Description: Most of the stories we tell are about great feats, dangerous journeys, or daring confrontations—exceptional moments in our existence. But what about how we live every single day? In Everyday Life, Joseph A. Amato offers an account of daily existence that reminds us how important the quotidian is...read more

Product Description: The three Sicilies of Joseph Amato's unusual and finely crafted book can be counted, according to its table of contents, as those of fiction, poetry, and social and family history. But they can also be enumerated in another way-the homeland of his ancestors, especially his paternal grandmother, a strong but tragic figure whose story frames and focuses the entire volume; the locale of his own travels and experiences, vividly captured in the poems at the center of the work; and the historical and spiritual fountainhead of so much of his own personality and world view...read more

Product Description: Human beings are surrounded by surfaces: from our skin to faces, to the walls and streets of our homes and cities, to the images, books, and screens of our cultures and civilizations, to the natural world and what we imagine beyond...read more

Product Description: Through research, historical narratives, and storytelling, historian and author Joseph A. Amato demonstrates how Americans with mixed ancestry and common origins might produce truly extraordinary family histories as he follows his poor, obscure, and truly "mongrel" family through seven generations, revealing their place in the key events of America's past...read more

An in-depth examination of humankind's first mode of travel traces the history of walking from the first human migrations to the vast, marching armies of ancient Greece and Rome, with special emphasis placed on the relationship between walking and social class.

Product Description: 2004 Minnesota Book Award WinnerThe Midwestern small town has long held an iconic place in American culture—from the imaginings of Sinclair Lewis's Main Street and Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio to Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Joseph A. Amato proposes a bold and innovative approach to writing local history in this imaginative, wide-ranging, and deeply engaging exploration of the meaning of place and home. Arguing that people of every place and time deserve a history, Amato draws on his background as a European cultural historian and a prolific writer of local history to explore such topics as the history of cleanliness, sound, anger, madness, the clandestine, and the environment in southwestern Minnesota...read more

A history of this minute particle spans a thousand years of Western civilization, from the naturalism of the medieval period through the intensely curious Renaissance, to the modern worlds of nanotechnology and viral research. (view table of contents)

Product Description: This inquiry into matters of heart, conducted under the shadows of pending surgery, awakens themes of boyhood, education, and marriage and prompt questions about loyalty to a deceased father, connections with immigrant grandparents, loss and rediscovery of faith, and solitude versus community...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Book by Amato, Joseph

Product Description: An extended reflection on the pleasures and wisdom of golf, "Golf Beats Us All" will satisfy the philosopher lurking in every avid golfer and make the golfer smarter and wiser about himself and his game. Author Joe Amato has long been fascinated by the myriad of pleasures offered by golf...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Product Description: Victims and Values joins history and ethics, conducting a timely inquiry into conscience and politics. Mindful of William James's notion that ethics must be grounded in the historical situation, this book examines fundamental ambiquities, dichotomies, and contradictions that we experience about the worth of our own suffering and that of others...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)