The Summer Reading List

Miracles, small and large

by Brian Clarey

Justin Catanoso and I have a lot in common. We are both editors of weekly newspapers, and both of us grew up in the Northeast before settling in Greensboro to nurture our families and careers. We are both married to beautiful blondes, and we both have daughters named Rosie. And we share a common heritage.

Catanoso, like my own mother, is an American of full-blooded Italian descent, and we can both trace our roots back to Calabria, the toe of the boot.

You can read the history of Italy in his face: his Roman nose and heavy brow, raw intelligence gleaming in his dark eyes, his jaw like an outcropping of rock, his olive-oil skin and hair like black wire.

He looks like he could be one of my uncles, out there throwing bocce balls on the lawn.

My Italian-ness has manifested itself in a fascination with food and a penchant for obscene hand gestures. But after finding out a distant cousin had been beatified by the Catholic church and was on the short list for sainthood, Catanoso dug deep into the peninsula's soil and unearthed two of the ancient pillars of Italian culture: faith and family, themes explored in his new book My Cousin the Saint: A Search for Faith, Family and Miracles.

A prospective saint must perform three documented miracles in order to be canonized, remember. And remember, too, that Catanoso is a man of professional skepticism, a journalist who once specialized in science, one who had left the Roman Catholic Church far behind.

It all began with a family trip to Italy in 2003, when Catanoso learned about his cousin, Gaetano Catanoso, and his impending sainthood. In a small restaurant in the village of Chorio, from which his grandfather fled in the early 1900s to chase the American Dream, Catanoso connected with dozens of family members in an impromptu binding of the family tree. One after another they filled the place. And they all looked like him in the way family members do.

"They just kept coming in," he says. "It was like a freakin' Frank Capra movie. It was like a dream."

The experience became a 500-word commentary, aired nationally on NPR, something of a miracle in itself - it's hard to get a piece aired on NPR. Even more improbable was that a renowned literary agent, Randi Murray, was listening in California, and that she decided to give Catanoso a cold call. Soon Judith Miller at HarperCollins was working on the book at the same time she was paging through OJ Simpson's fake confessional. Now the book is out, and Catanoso takes time from his schedule as executive editor of the Triad Business Journal to spread the word.

In a meeting room at the Greensboro Public Library on a hot summer night, Catanoso stands at ease in front of an assembled crowd who later, at the signing table, reveal themselves to be Italians, Catholics, teachers, neighbors. But for now they are audience to Catanoso's readings and teachings - yes, he's gained no small bit of wisdom from writing this book.

It is part spiritual exploration, part family history, with doses of poignancy, tragedy and discovery folded in, all devices for figuring out what it means to have a saint in the family.

He ends the lecture with a piece of advice given him by a college history professor: "Believe what you can."

Since writing the book he's picked up the threads of his Catholicism, started going to mass at St. Pius X Church and doing his best to honor the spiritual side of life.

"I really wanted to know more about Gaetano," he says after the lecture. "I feel like the one thing I can do in Greensboro is to go to mass. And the mass is the same as it was a hundred years ago, only then they did it in Latin."

The brand of Catholicism preached in the southernmost regions of Italy is steeped in superstition and folklore, some of it straight from the Dark Ages. Things Gaetano touched, pieces of his bone and hair are revered as sacred artifacts in his homeland. Gaetano himself is preserved in a glass tomb in the apse of the church where he spoke. There's a picture of it in the book, surrounded by sisters from the order of nuns Gaetano founded. They're all smiling.

While he lived, Gaetano used a cilice - sort of a barbed-wire garter - to intentionally inflict pain on himself.

"That took me a while to figure out," Catanoso says. "It's a creepy thing, you know?" But, he says, it was nothing like the albino in The DaVinci Code.

"He didn't wear it," he says. "He would put it in his bed and sleep on it. It was just constant discomfort, a reminder of Christ's suffering. He also believed in the concept of reparation. Basically everyone he lived with was suffering - they were hungry, they were poor, they were isolated. He looked at it as a way of lightening the suffering of others. That was the level and intensity of his faith."

But can a reporter, one who's trained to toil in facts and science and provable evidence... can a man like that believe in miracles? Gaetano has had three certified by the Vatican, which claims his sacred artifacts healed the sick and defied death.

The reporter in him is still grappling with that one.

"What I have come close to believing," he qualifies, "is that there are things that happen that I can't explain. Is that the hand of God? A miracle? Or do we just not know?"

Another sigh. He's eating chorizo with pesto and greens now at a table in Caf Europa, drinking an imported beer.

"If I stay on this road...," he continues, "I don't know. Sometimes I like to think I will believe."

More chorizo and some bread.

"You know what I believe?" he says. "I believe that the life of someone like Gaetano Catanoso, who was generous, radical in his faith... I believe in his goodness and the power it has in the world."

Gate City pulp

by Brian Clarey

Somewhere near Greensboro a badass biker lives in hiding, an enforcer who once went by the name of "Posiedon" when he rode with the Spartans, a man whose knowledge of ancient Greek history and the killing arts are equally impressive.

His name is Frank Kane, and now he is called back to the underworld to rescue a runaway young girl, who's thrown in with sex workers and immersed herself in international political intrigue. And there are always old enemies, old grudges, old habits.

John F. Saunders, who works as a dentist in Greensboro, shoehorned a few other clichs into his first novel, The Last Spartan, like the hastily introduced sidekick who's a whiz with computers, a treacherous stripper and a Middle Eastern assassin. And the storyline itself is cribbed from everything Andrew Vacchs has ever done.

But for all its faults - and in the uncorrected galley copy I read, there were more than a few - I fairly tore through this book. It's packed with plot, sure, and also a few bits of the history of ancient Greece and Spartan warrior culture that Saunders must have picked up as a classics major at UNCG.

You see, the Spartans are a biker gang... were a biker gang... based on Hellenic culture and things went sour when Spanish Johnny... never mind.

Heavy on action, light on message, this is a great summer read for those who still love the genre of pulp fiction and need to know how bikers hide guns in pizza boxes. And we're sure to be seeing more from this author: The next Frank Kane book, Lock and Load, is already in the pipeline and Saunders is hard at work on the next installment, The Spartan Negotiator.