From Publishers Weekly
This year's Drue Heinz Literature Prize winner is a pasticcio of tales documenting the Italian experience from Renaissance times to present-day Chicago. Novelist, translator and oral historian Bernardi (The Day Laid on the Altar) gives this book a coherence less through plot than through a consistent focus on Italian families, highlighting the way each generation attempts to pass to the next the knowledge it considers vital. In the titular first story, some of that knowledge is horticultural, as a grandfather tutors a young boy in the intricacies of mushroom gathering. It's a pastime with high stakes: minor differences separate the prized mushroom from the deadly one. In "The Coal Miner, Above Ground," the family has made the long journey to America, following in the path of the "bold ones" who emigrated first and sent money back to their families. As the family assimilates, the icons of America become an essential part of their emotional landscape. In "Working the Clock," the Michael Jordan-era Chicago Bulls are playing on television. Ray Gomorri has gone to the game with his son. If the Bulls win, his wife, Rina, watching the game at home alone, will not need to take the pills that protect her from the "dark periods." In "Rustlings," a young mother discovers that part of becoming an American is "to unlearn what things were called," replacing Italian with a flawless, unaccented English. But certain words still come more easily in Italian, reinforcing Bernardi's theme that American-style success doesn't replace an essentially Italian consciousness. (Oct.) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
In In the Gathering Woods, a collection of short stories (the 2000 Drue Heinz Literature Prize winner), Bernardi studies both Italians and the progeny who fled to America, using settings that range from the Renaissance (a chapter from A Day Laid on the Altar is included and titled "Waiting for Giotto") to the 20th century. In the title story, an Italian boy, Costante, learns about his family's pastDand that of people in neighboring villagesDwhile mushroom picking with his grandfather, Isaia. His grandfather teaches him how to differentiate the edible from the poisonous mushrooms by telling tales of those who died while indulging in this seemingly simple pleasure. Bernardi brings her collectionDand her novelDfull circle beautifully with the closing stories "Noli Me Tangere" and "Shards." Letizia Mattei, an overworked doctor whose only recent love has been an affair with a married man, leaves the States and returns to her ill mother's Italian homeland. There, an old monkish man gives her a tour of cave fresco paintings: written over one of the frescoes she reads in Latin the biblical passage "Upon the Altar the Day Is Slain." During their conversations, the old man realizes he knows her, or someone like her, and soon it becomes evident that her old family nameDlike that of the hermit-artist in her novelDis Bartolai. Both books are recommended for all literary collections.DMark Rotella, New York Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
The winner of the 2000 Drue Heinz Literature Prize is truly fiction worthy of award. In a series of stories set from Italy to Chicago, from the sixteenth century to the present, Bernardi shines a light into the souls of women and children, old men and strong men. Bartolomeo de Bartolai cannot read, but he draws on rocks the way Giotto did and hoards shards of colored glass, the need for art a hunger like that for food after hard labor. Much later in time, Egidio Bartolai loads coal in the American Southwest and writes home on postcards GraceAnne DeCandido
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Tony Ardizzone
This imenergy of a novel. In the Gathering Woods is even more delightful to read the second time around.

Book Description
2000 Drue Heinz Literature Prize Winner Selected by Frank Conroy This years Drue Heinz Literature Prize winner, In the Gathering Woods, contains a cast of characters who hail from the same Italian ancestors, but whose stories come at us unbounded by time and space. The book opens early in the twentieth-century, with a narrators boyhood recollections of gathering mushrooms with his grandfather; a narrator who seems still haunted by ambling. The language of these stories is both lyrical and comic, providing insight through the particular details of Bernardis writing.

About the Author
Adria Bernardi is the author of a novel, The Day Laid on the Altar, and an oral history, Houses with Names: The Italian Immigrants of Highwood, Illinois, and is the translator of Gianni Celatis Adventures in Africa, and of screenwriter Tonino Guerras poetry, Abandoned PXCERPT:

FROM THE PUBLISHER

This year's Drue Heinz Literature Prize winner, In the Gathering Woods, contains a cast of characters with the same Italian ancestry, but whose stories come at us unbounded by time and space. The book opens early in the twentieth century, with a narrator's boyhood recollections of gathering mushrooms with his grandfather - a narrator who seems still haunted by a terrifying local legend that tormented him as a boy. We skip backward to a young shepherd-artist in the Apennine mountains in the 1500s, who yearns to be discovered, as Giotto was. Later, a preverbal baby accumulates bits of the conversation carried on by adults at the table above her head; a teenager struggles to learn Latin; a neurologist from Chicago returns to the Apennines to deposit shards of glass at a grave.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

This year's Drue Heinz Literature Prize winner is a pasticcio of tales documenting the Italian experience from Renaissance times to present-day Chicago. Novelist, translator and oral historian Bernardi (The Day Laid on the Altar) gives this book a coherence less through plot than through a consistent focus on Italian families, highlighting the way each generation attempts to pass to the next the knowledge it considers vital. In the titular first story, some of that knowledge is horticultural, as a grandfather tutors a young boy in the intricacies of mushroom gathering. It's a pastime with high stakes: minor differences separate the prized mushroom from the deadly one. In "The Coal Miner, Above Ground," the family has made the long journey to America, following in the path of the "bold ones" who emigrated first and sent money back to their families. As the family assimilates, the icons of America become an essential part of their emotional landscape. In "Working the Clock," the Michael Jordan-era Chicago Bulls are playing on television. Ray Gomorri has gone to the game with his son. If the Bulls win, his wife, Rina, watching the game at home alone, will not need to take the pills that protect her from the "dark periods." In "Rustlings," a young mother discovers that part of becoming an American is "to unlearn what things were called," replacing Italian with a flawless, unaccented English. But certain words still come more easily in Italian, reinforcing Bernardi's theme that American-style success doesn't replace an essentially Italian consciousness. (Oct.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

In In the Gathering Woods, a collection of short stories (the 2000 Drue Heinz Literature Prize winner), Bernardi studies both Italians and the progeny who fled to America, using settings that range from the Renaissance (a chapter from A Day Laid on the Altar is included and titled "Waiting for Giotto") to the 20th century. In the title story, an Italian boy, Costante, learns about his family's past--and that of people in neighboring villages--while mushroom picking with his grandfather, Isaia. His grandfather teaches him how to differentiate the edible from the poisonous mushrooms by telling tales of those who died while indulging in this seemingly simple pleasure. Bernardi brings her collection--and her novel--full circle beautifully with the closing stories "Noli Me Tangere" and "Shards." Letizia Mattei, an overworked doctor whose only recent love has been an affair with a married man, leaves the States and returns to her ill mother's Italian homeland. There, an old monkish man gives her a tour of cave fresco paintings: written over one of the frescoes she reads in Latin the biblical passage "Upon the Altar the Day Is Slain." During their conversations, the old man realizes he knows her, or someone like her, and soon it becomes evident that her old family name--like that of the hermit-artist in her novel--is Bartolai. Both books are recommended for all literary collections.--Mark Rotella, New York Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

Kirkus Reviews

Bernardi, a translator and historian (Houses with Names: The Italian Immigrants of Highwood, Illinois, 1990), quickly follows her first novel (The Day Laid on the Altar, p. 813) with this Drue Heinz prize-winning collection of stories, set both in suburban Chicago and in the Italian town her family comes from. One of the longest, "Waiting for Giotto," does double duty as the first chapter of Bernardi's novel, but it's a welcome cheat for those who haven't read the previous book: an effective story of a shepherd boy who aspires to be a great painter like Giotto. A number of tales are set in the Old Country: in the title piece, a boy learns from his grandfather how to distinguish among mushrooms but is almost paralyzed by fear of picking the deadly ones; and in "The Child Carrier," a woman from the mountains serves as wet nurse to abandoned babies before they're claimed by wealthy adoptive parents. Roughly chronological, the stories connect loosely through characters as well—the first America-set one records the life of the wet nurse's brother, a coal miner in Colorado. The volume leaps ahead to modern Illinois and tales of growing up in an ethnic family: "Sunday" is a baby's-eye-view of a family dinner, and the next two pieces capture the frustrations of a later-generation Italian-American housewife. Bernardi provides two views of a trip, in 1968, to downtown Chicago to visit the Field Museum, and as "Working the Clock" makes clear, the mother is fighting hard against depression. Her daughter, meanwhile, worries about boys, school, and confusing religious instruction. The strongest stories skip to the next generation: a middle-aged Italian-Americandoctor,dedicated to her work, returns to Italy in order to honor her mother's last wish. Folkloric at first, and full of Italian phrases (translated), Bernardi's somber stories have the outlines of a grand family saga but settle for the minor pleasures of competent ethnic fiction. Bloch, Robert HELL ON EARTH: The Lost Bloch, Volume Two Ed. by David J. Schow Subterranean Press(P.O. Box 190106, Burton, MI 48519) (310 pp.) Oct. 1, 2000