His mother’s fam­i­ly was Mid­west­ern, straight-laced, and vague­ly anti-Semit­ic, in the man­ner of well-bred WASPs. His father’s fam­i­ly was Jew­ish, hav­ing fled Rus­sia for Italy, then bare­ly escap­ing fas­cist Italy to migrate to New York. Dis­parate back­grounds can some­times pro­duce sol­id mar­riages, but Alexan­der Stille’s par­ents rarely got along with each oth­er. How his par­ents met, how they man­aged a stormy but life­long mar­riage, and how each of them, so com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent, earned the respect and love of their chil­dren is the focus of this mar­velous mem­oir. Along the way, read­ers learn a great deal about the Chica­go-based Bauhaus artists of his mother’s youth, the strug­gles of Jews in Italy under Mussolini’s racial laws, the quirks of quick­ie divorces in the Vir­gin Islands in the For­ties, Ital­ian pol­i­tics in the post­war peri­od, the dawn­ing of sec­ond-wave fem­i­nism in Amer­i­ca, and much, much more. Apart from every­thing one can learn from the his­to­ries of the Stille par­ents, and apart from the enter­tain­ing cast of char­ac­ters each parent’s fam­i­ly pro­vides, Alexan­der Stille is one of those writ­ers who could describe the paint dry­ing on the wall and make it utter­ly fas­ci­nat­ing. Con­sid­er his descrip­tion of his father’s clos­et (”a kind of rest home for retired cloth­ing”) or his father’s piles of news­pa­pers (“tak­ing over the apart­ment like trop­i­cal veg­e­ta­tion reclaim­ing land that had been painstak­ing­ly cleared”). You won’t want this book to end, but when it does, you can prob­a­bly think of at least a dozen friends who real­ly ought to have a copy. Photographs.