Driving West on the Pulaski Skyway

Somehow John Ortenzio Bargowski has caught the quintessential soul of the Italian-American experience in a New Jersey we will recognize. Here are the subjects, familiar yet freshly observed: the central importance of the family and the household gods, the echoes of the old Catholic rituals, a couple's courage in dealing as they can with a daughter's loss, the hundred daily blessings, things we take for granted or never see, until tragedy brings home to us the rock-hard sacredness of what we...