Revere Beach Elegy

In Revere Beach Elegy, Roland Merullo returns to his childhood heaven of Revere, Massachusetts, a place, five miles from Boston, where the affirmation of family -- fifty cousins, grandparents, aunts and uncles that are more like mothers and fathers -- and the tough codes of his gritty working-class neighborhood form an insular world almost impossible to leave.In one of the most indelible essays in American literature by a son about his father, Merullo writes of his second-generation Italian-American father, a man whose drive and pride are a crucible for his oldest son. He tells the story of being plucked from McKinley Junior High School to become a scholarship boy at the elite Exeter Academy, where his trajectory toward "something softer and richer, something said to resemble success" begins, shakily.His later travels -- to the former USSR, to Micronesia as a Peace Corps volunteer, and eventually to Italy, where the annoyances of family travel resolve themselves, for a moment, into a t