Amore

October 6, 2014
Friedland, a professor of cultural sociology and religion at the University of California, Santa Barbara, covers a lot of ground, literally and figuratively, in this memoir about raising twin daughters in Rome, the city founded by the mythical twin boys Romulus and Remus. Rather than allow his middle-school aged girls (born in California in 1992 after nine years of infertility) to grow up in a "Westcoast world of blowjobs and Botox," he accepts a two-year assignment at the University of Rome. In this introspective travelogue on the vagaries of love Italian style, Friedland weaves statistics about Italian sexual activity compared to American, with personal observations to create a sort of guide for modern parents. Sorted into five sections that capture Rome in different moods, Friedland opens with an homage to the 1953 William Wyler classic Roman Holiday, the film starring Audrey Hepburn, in which the actress names Rome as her favorite European city. Infidelity and the legacy of Casanova, co-exists with the Holy See in a magical part of the world where Michelangelo "sculpted and painted nudes in great profusion." The central difference between Romans and Californians appears to lie in their attitudes to love and adultery. Perhaps predictably, one daughter has happy memories of the Roman sojourn, while the other experienced a traumatic incident that tainted her experience of Rome. While all this information is thought-provoking, what stands out is the attraction of living in a glamorous city where it's possible to share dinner with director Lina Wertmuller.

October 1, 2014
Cultural sociologist Friedland (Religious Studies and Sociology/Univ. of California, Santa Barbara; The Fellowship: The Untold Story of Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship, 2006, etc.) examines the life-changing "love lessons" he learned from the city of Rome.For the author, the Italian city became a personal touchstone for love and romance after he and his wife honeymooned there as a young couple. He would return to the city several times afterward, growing more fascinated each time with the way Romans combined sex and love without guilt, shame or fear. In the early 2000s, just as his two girls were entering adolescence, he was offered a chance to teach students at the University of Rome, students who had very different ideas about sex and love than their American counterparts. As Friedland watched his daughters begin to negotiate puberty away from the "West Coast world of blowjobs and Botox," he came to know students for whom affection and loyalty were crucial parts of the erotic-and eventually, marriage-equation. The author suggests that this attitude stems from the way male and female bodies are openly celebrated and enjoyed in Italian culture and from the fact that in Italy, personal and familial connections serve as a bulwark against unreliable institutions. In the U.S., where an element of shame has always traditionally surrounded sexuality, it is more difficult for young people to reconcile romance with the erotic. The sexual revolution, which was supposed to liberate people from inhibition, actually had the unintended consequence of separating emotion from sex and exalting "pleasure at the expense of tenderness." The result has been the creation of a loveless society, where, notes the author sagely, "marriage is imagined as a contract for self-realization and sex a consumption good." Intelligent, thoughtful and well-researched, Friedland's book is not only a love letter to Rome, but also to his daughters and the members of their generation, for whose personal happiness he fears.

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November 1, 2014

This is at once a lovely and troublesome book. At its heart, it's Friedland's (religious studies and sociology, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara; New York Univ.; The Fellowship) deeply felt memoir of time spent in Rome, talking to old men in the park, coffee shop proprietors, his beautiful landlady, the wise guy on the corner. The volume is also a touching look at love and struggle in the author's own family: his strong-willed and often at-odds parents, his deep love for his wife and their struggle with infertility, and his attempts to help his twin daughters make sense of the environment around them as they enter puberty. All of this is hypnotizing--Friedland has a real way with words, and he shows us the world through his eyes effortlessly. Unfortunately, he tries to integrate his work as a sociologist into this reverie by analyzing romantic and sexual mores in America and Italy, critiquing hook-up culture in the former and the power of the Catholic Church in the latter. The interruption is a bit jarring and the conclusions are tenuous at best, and offensive at worst. VERDICT A sensuous, romantic memoir for Italophiles, crossed with shallow sociological forays into modern sexual mores, this volume is an enjoyable if somewhat uneven travelog.--Emilia Packard, Austin, TX

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 15, 2014
Cultural sociologist Friedland and his wife, Debra, lived briefly in Rome with their twin daughters when they were very young. As the girls entered their early teens, the couple decided to return to Rome for two years to give their daughters the chance to come of age in a more classically romantic environment than the U.S. A college professor, Friedland had seen firsthand how young Americans viewed love and sex: a casual hookup was easier to manage than holding hands in public. In Rome, the girls would see widespread Catholicism that kept down the divorce rate; they would also see hand-holding, kissing, and other signs of courtship as well as widespread eroticism and infidelity. Looking back on his own coming-of-age in the countercultural 1960s, Friedland reviews cultural influences from Elvis to Madonna, from Erica Jong to Sex in the City, arguing for the need to balance sexual liberation and sexual license. This is a fascinating contrasting of the quality of life in the U.S. and that in Rome and what the difference may mean for the future of family life and national destiny.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)