Word: donato
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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CHRIST IN CONCRETE - Pietro di Donato-Bobbs-Merrill...
This is the precocious first novel of a precocious bricklayer. Born 28 years ago in the slums of West Hoboken, N. J., handsome Pietro di Donato was 14 when his father was killed in a construction accident, leaving a widow and eight children. Pietro, a "bricklayer in diapers," took up his father's bricklaying trowel, has supported his family ever since. In his off-hours he read everything in sight, especially Russian novels...
Christ in Concrete, autobiographical but imaginative, is a passionate, humorous, pathetic story of peasant Italians in the U. S., at work, in tenements, in animal anguish and animal high spirits. Author di Donato's Italians speak a translated Italian, lyrical, bawdy, tender, crude...
With so much to recommend it, Christ in Concrete has one unfortunate fault-its occasional passages of impressionistic, Joycean rhetoric. But these passages are not structural. Without them, the book would be as solid as one of Author di Donato's brick walls...
First to break the tape was Boston's 119-lb. Francis Darrah, a seasoned distance runner at 25, whose time of 2 hr., 8 min., 14.6 sec. was the fastest ever made on foot up the mountain. Six minutes later came Paul Donato, another Bostonian, who (like Darrah) had eaten a pound of rare beefsteak for breakfast. Loudest cheers went to 45-year-old Clyde Ormsby of Colorado Springs, oldest entrant in the race, who finished seventh. Called upon by broadcasters to say a few words over the radio, Mr. Ormsby was in a sorry predicament. The patrolman...