Ebook: American English, Italian chocolate: small subjects of great importance

"American English, Italian Chocolate is a memoir in essays beginning in the American Midwest and ending in north central Italy. In sharply rendered vignettes, Rick Bailey reflects on donuts and ducks, horses and car crashes, outhouses and EKGs. He travels all night from Michigan to New Jersey to attend the funeral of a college friend. After a vertiginous climb, he staggers in clogs across the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. In a trattoria in the hills above the Adriatic, he ruminates on the history and glories of beans, from Pythagoras to Thoreau, from the Saginaw Valley to the Province of Urbino. Bailey is a bumbling extra in a college production of Richard III. He is a college professor losing touch with a female student whose life is threatened by her husband. He is a father tasting samples of his daughter's wedding cake. He is a son witnessing his aging parents' decline. He is the husband of an Italian immigrant who takes him places he never imagined visiting, let alone making his own. At times humorous, at times bittersweet, Bailey's ultimate subject is growing and knowing, finding the surprise and the sublime in the ordinary detail of daily life"--Provided by publisher.;1. Big White Birds -- 2. Boy Scouts, Ringworm, and Paris -- 3. Sound Off -- 4. Kissing Age -- 5. There Will Be Horses -- 6. Sick Wild -- 7. The Man from Glad, Car Crash, Amnesia -- 8. Clinical -- 9. Psyched -- 10. Love and Breakup in the Time of Watergate -- 11. Love at First Shite -- 12. Feet First -- 13. For Donna, Ibsen, Pepys, Levitation -- 14. The Soft Imperative -- 15. Third-Wave Coffee -- 16. Wisdom Teeth and Encyclopaedia Britannica -- 17. What's Up with Dramatic-Value Vomit? -- 18. Old Houses, New Residents -- 19. Bee Spree -- 20. Hello, Mr. President -- 21. Chemical Neutral -- 22. Pure Corn -- 23. Fly -- 24. The Honey Room -- 25. Bridge Failure, Heart Attack, Fava Beans -- 26. Monkey, Nailing Biting, Jesus -- 27. Cardio, Lightbulbs, and a Funeral -- 28. The Rule of One -- 29. Water Me -- 30. Feathers -- 31. The Quality of Your Sleep -- 32. My Father, Going Deaf -- 33. No Secrets, Victoria -- 34. Flip-Flops and the Leaning Tower of Pisa -- 35. Ravioli, Richard III, and a Dead Bird -- 36. Apri la Porta -- 37. Buongiorno -- 38. What's New -- 39. Small Beans -- 40. American English, Italian Chocolate.