"This historical and personal journey into the development of the 'self' from the primitive to the modern era demonstrates how the self is both 'a many' and 'a one...' As Amato argues in his closing chapters. 'The very forces that made us individual in a rich and changing society did so at the cost of our inheritance and transcendence."

"In this compelling work, Joseph Amato undertakes to understand the evolution of the self--both its interior growth and the influence of ouside factor. He succeeds by taking the readers on a journey through Western history itself, stopping to study major thinkers such as Montaigne and Rousseau, important periods such as the Renaissance and Enlightenment, the arts and religion, and yet not overlooking the self of everday man."

"Like the fecundity of the cell in creating tissues, organs, structures, and bodies, Jospeh Amato's fecund imagination takes us on a contemplative journey of the human body as the vessel of our containment, our instrument of action, and a tether to our self-awareness and spirit."

"Building on his magisterial account of the development of the modern self, Amato offers a series of vivid and engrossing reflections on the body -- on hands and feet, surfaces and touch, and the machines and tools that extend our bodies beyond themselves."

This book of poetry by Sicilian- American historian Joseph A. Amato is a gem. It is rich in wisdom and gratitude for the gift and grace of life. Known especially as an advocate for taking local history and the importance of place more seriously, Amato has also written with insight on a wide variety of topics.

In this superb collection, Joseph Amato wonderfully blends writing about everyday people and events with a sacred yearning for the mystical and eternal gifts of grace.

Buffalo Man is a story written for his grandchildren and inspired by the author's grandfather, a joker and teller of tales. We are fortunate to share these family stories, as when they are processed through a scholar like Joseph Amato, they become something far different, far deeper, with accurate historical background, and an insight uniquely his own, for the ages and to the benefit of all who enjoy a good story, well-told.

There are many delightful and endearing aspects of this story - Gar's trek to visit a shrunken Paul Bunyan to hear first-hand life as a giant - and so many historical details that will clue the reader that this is no ordinary tale. In so many ways I value this story of Gar, "tall" and fanciful tale that it is, as it fleshes out a period of history, with the early settlers and traders of Minnesota, the Metís, and the Native Americans who were this area's first residents and still heirs to its longest history, all of whom we rarely encounter in today's world - it is indeed a period that should not be forgotten.

This book combines impressively wide reading with a sense of how life was and is composed. Amato ranges widely through topics as varied as dirt and muck, walking, and the charm of spices, and through time periods from early agriculture to mechanization. The result is a thought-provoking introduction to change and continuity in daily life.

In Everyday Life, Amato reflects on the complex and changing textures of everyday life, beginning with societies of scarcity and relative lack of change and ending with Amato’s own American life of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A work of wide-ranging erudition, it nonetheless offers food for reflection to the everyday reader today, for it lays out how life—even in the very recent past—differed from life in present-day societies of abundance and of seemingly unstoppable change.

Amato makes a compelling case for exploring the complex history of everyday life. Drawing on an amazingly broad range of historical, cultural, anthropological, and literary sources, Amato pays keen attention to the interplay of place, landscape, and ‘things’ on human experience and imagination. Like his previous books, Everyday Life richly rewards the reader. It is a unique, reflective, and provocative essay that honors the richness of human life in all its variety.

For an hour interview of Amato on Everyday Life, see Al Zambone’s Historically Speaking, Podcast, Episode 74 “How the Ordinary Became Extraordinary,” http://historicallythinking.org/episode74/

Defying neat classification, The Book of Twos is far from the standard monographic fare of today’s academy. It is a meditation on and celebration of the heterogeneity of things—a unique and provocative combination of keen observation, rich historical and philosophical insight, religious-based wisdom, and poetry. It is the product of one of the most creative thinkers I know.

The Book of Twos combines an unusual breadth of subject matter with genuine originality—the weaving of disparate worlds into a coherent narrative, a narrative that is fertile terrain for our re-imagining as readers. You do that for me in all your books including notably in Dust: A History of the Small and Invisible. Yet “The Book of Twos” is much more a literary and philosophical exploration of cognition itself, of the basis of self-knowing through an expansive mental expedition of seeing, touching, feeling, reflecting, considering, interrogating, contrasting, expressing, etc. To be successful, such an expedition in humane letters requires the singular well-stocked and unfettered mind, a certain restlessness of inquiry, and a limpid expressiveness. Not many people, I suspect, could accomplish what you set out to do here and succeeded in doing.

This book is in line with his previous successful books Dust, A History of the Small and Invisible, On Foot: A History of Walking, and Surfaces, a History. Like those books, The Book of Twos is extremely original and based on a rare and extraordinary understanding of a variety of subjects, including the historical, linguistic, material, philosophical, spiritual, metaphorical, and psychological.

Amato is an unparalleled master of bringing together the concrete and the abstract. Much of our thinking is done in opposing—and sometime uniting—dualities, and no one has investigated this important phenomenon as well Amato does here. His abstractions arise from the deep soil in which our thoughts and attitudes are rooted.

This book will be a classic for people who like to understand the world they think in.

My Three Sicilies is a declaration of love. Here past and future coexist, and here the poet explores this "unresolved duality" of life. Looking for his roots Joseph Amato encounters people, stories, myths, sites, villages, and cities on this island that appears as the true center of the earth.

For an extensive podcast review by Mark Spano, see http://www.timesofsicily.com/three-sicilies-stories-poems-histories/

With this wonderful history of the world as a collage of surfaces, Joe Amato sets the record straight. Surfaces define our relationship to the world -- they have their own poetry, aesthetics, science, glamour, and wonder.

Highly original, deeply sensitive, and amazingly informed, Surfaces is one of the great books of the twenty-first century. It is eloquent and beautiful, based on solid thought and spelled out with imagination, emotion, refined speculation, and a rich yet simple language.

Surfaces is utterly unique and almost defies categorization. Amato romps over vast landscapes of intellectual and artistic terrain, demonstrating intellectual breadth, insight, and creativity. This is an exciting book—bold, provocative, poetic—that invites contemplation and opens the reader’s mind to the depth and complexity of the human experience.

Joseph Amato displays superior scholarly range and imagination in this lively, flowing, and often inventive study of humans' relationship with their world. Surfaces offers us many intriguing and frequently surprising insights about a subject that we have never thought of in quite this way before. This is an enormously ambitious and thoughtprovoking book.