…A colorful, bittersweet memoir, a sensitive rendering of immigrant culture as found in one man's family.

– Publishers Weekly

…Vincent Panella's sad, harsh, but loving remembrance of his Italian immigrant family….is a personal journey. Like so many other third and fourth generation immigrant Americans, Panella knows his heritage only vaguely through Americanized clichés. He comes to understand himself, finally, by digging up the family roots.

– The Trenton Times

Central to Panella's search for identity and self-knowledge is the haunting question of what cultural loss was accrued by these new Americans when they began to forsake their ties with "The Other Side," Italy, the life-world of Naples and Sicily, for the streets of Manhattan, "paved with guns and gold." For overshadowing Panella's past is not only the gunman, the gangster with the violin case, but a people whose values were geared to "making it," making it in the material American sense, making it with money alone.

- A. J. Montesi, St. Louis Globe-Democrat