Ciao a tutti! È tempo di ricaricare le batterie: domani volerò a Creta per una settimana. Il blog si prende una piccola pausa insieme a me, ma voi restate pure comodi. Lasciate le vostre opinioni nei commenti, ci riaggiorneremo prestissimo al mio ritorno! “Le persone non fanno i viaggi, sono i viaggi che fanno le persone.”( John Steinbeck) The blog is taking a break (but I’m leaving you the…

Immagine: un trattore Landini CV 45-50

"[...] Arriva un trattore e ti sbatte fuori dieci famiglie. I trattori stanno dappertutto ora. Arrivano e ti sbattono fuori i mezzadri. Come fa tuo padre a tener duro?" […] E alla fine i delegati dei proprietari arrivavano al punto. La mezzadria non può più funzionare. Un uomo con un trattore può prendere il posto di dodici o quattordici famiglie. Gli si dà un salario e si prende tutto il raccolto.

John Steinbeck’s The Winter of Our Discontent is a late, bitter, and deeply searching novel, one that turns the tools of the social novel inward and asks what becomes of integrity when decency itself is treated as a liability. Set in the fictional Long Island town of New Bayport, the book follows Ethan Hawley, a once-prosperous man now reduced to working in a grocery store that his family once…

John Steinbeck’s The Pearl is a parable as sharp as a knife and as sombre as a verdict. On the surface, it is a simple story: Kino, a poor pearl diver, discovers an immense treasure, “the Pearl of the World,” and imagines that it will lift his family into dignity, safety, and possibility. But the author shapes that premise into a moral fable about the violent instability of hope under capitalism,…

John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row is one of his most deceptively modest books: a novel that seems to drift rather than drive, yet beneath its relaxed surface lies a carefully tuned meditation on community, poverty, loneliness, and grace. The author turns a working-class street in Monterey into a kind of moral ecosystem, where the “misfits,” dreamers, drunks, scientists, sex workers, shopkeepers, and…

John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath is one of the great American novels not merely because it records suffering, but because it transforms historical catastrophe into a moral and literary vision of national scale. Set against the Dust Bowl migration, the novel follows the Joads as they are driven from Oklahoma into California, but its deepest subject is the erosion and remaking of human dignity…

John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men is a deceptively small book with the moral weight of a tragedy. Its scale is intimate—two migrant labourers, a few days on a ranch, a single dream repeated like a prayer—yet its implications are expansive, reaching outward to the economic desperation of the Great Depression, the fragility of masculine identity, the loneliness of the dispossessed, and the cruel…