Anthony Valerio

Google.com homepage pays tribute to Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis. Read my book about the life & work of this great scientist. Wash Your hands! How did he make his way to his great discoveries?

google.doodle.

Just released--Anthony Valerio's biography of Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis, the doctor who discovered the causes of childbed fever and its means of prevention. Semmelweis (1817-1865) was largely ignored, ultimately placed in an asylum and there was killed.

cover design by Dave Barry for Semmelweis, the Women's Doctor - Just Released!

The Life and Work of pioneering physician Ignaz P. Semmelweis, who discovered the causes and means of prevention of childbed fever, the H.I.V. and cancer of his day. Called the "Father of Antisepsis," he was largely ignored, placed in an asylum and murdered.

Proud to say that though Semmelweis lived and worked about 150 years ago the great art for this project from Aharon Gluska and Dave Barry root the great doctor in a powerful present. Below examples of their work for this project.

"He was a man who did good for women."-- M. Zantedeschi

Young Semmelweis by Aharon Gluska, found in Semmelweis, the Women's Doctor

NEW EDITION, TONI CADE BAMBARA'S ONE SICILIAN NIGHT. COVER DESIGN BY DAVE BARRY. PLUS EPILOGUE, WATER FOR TONI MORRISON

new edition print & E-book--
TONI CADE BAMBARA'S ONE SICILIAN NIGHT

including the essay WATER FOR TONI MORRISON

new cover design by Dave Barry

JOHN DANTE'S INFERNO, a Playboy's Life

new cover by Dave Barry

An Infernal Pleasure

This is a highly original way of telling the story of John Dante, self-made namesake of the more famous Dante. Using the medieval poet's vision of Hell as a kind of running parallel narrative, Anthony Valerio weaves a fascinating tale of ambition, excess, friendship, and rocking good times back in the day of the Playboy Clubs, replete with Bunnies, orgies, and hedonistic fun. Valerio writes with verve and compassion about men and women who ran after their dreams and their pleasures with abandon, living as if youth, potency, and beauty would never end. They did, of course, and this gives a poignant quality to the book. This is also the life story of an Italian American who came up from very humble origins to the heights of Hugh Hefner's sexy Never Never Land. I didn't always like these players' choices, and the machismo of that world is sometimes hard to take. Women are prized for their long, smooth legs, their willingness to service the men, their decorative essence, all of which is not the most admirable way of viewing women. But those were the times and those were the values that dominated Hef's universe. John Dante did have his own moral code, unusual as it was, and he was above all a good and faithful friend. Valerio is so expert at making us feel the lives of others, even those very far from our own experiences, and his colloquial style is just right. It seems that he wrote this book out of friendship, and so it is ultimately a kind, compassionate book. I am looking forward to many more tales told by the master storyteller, Anthony Valerio!

Welcome!

new revised edition with blue cover of SEMMELWEIS by Anthony Valerio

new revised edition of --

SEMMELWEIS

"His life was a benefictial example for all mankind." Kurt Vonnegut

LINK TO GREAT VIDEO RE SEMMELWEIS BY BEN TRAVERS

Just released--Print Edition of ANTHONY VALERIO'S SEMMELWEIS

PRESS RELEASE & COVER IMAGE

WRITING WORKSHOP IN THE COMFORT OF YOUR HOME

ANTHONY VALERIO'S 2 1/2 hr. ANIMATED VIDEO ON WRITING-

Write better in the comfort of your home.

Enter a professional writer's studio & life.

My 2 1/2 hour animated & animating writing workshop can help all levels of writers. You can try iit and purchase here:

https://www.udemy.com/course/learn-from-the-masters-anthony-valerio-on-writing/?instructorPreviewMode=guest

Testimonials:

The best
Valuable information
Engaging delivery
Helpful practice activities

thanks, AV

DANTE IN LOVE, a modern literary interpration of Dante's classic VITA NUOVA, A NEW LIFE

"The mixing of the two voices, the translator and the explicator, works wonderfully. A winner, very good stuff, really."
Giuseppe Mazzotta, Sterling Professor in the Humanities for Italian, Yale University.

"I just kept on reading it right through even though I had read the original many times. Anthony Valerio's version really makes it new.--Rebecca West, William R. Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Service Professor Emerita, University of Chicago.

DANTE IN LOVE, a love story for the ages

DANTE IN LOVE

the story of Beatrice & Dante, a love story for the ages

COVER IMAGE OF BEATRICE BY TONY PALLADINO

great RADIO SPOT!

link to radio interview - 7/11/'10

interesting and at times surprising in a great way, radio interview the other day. Thanks to host Ben Michael. AV

Press Release -- Semmelweis, the Women's Doctor

Press Release - Semmweis, the Women's Doctor

thanks to Professor Rebecca West for her generous words-

thanks to Prof. Rebecca West U. of Chicago for her generous words-

Thought that since I wrote them I might talk a little about my books. Ten in number, thus far, covering my writing life beginning in the late 1970's with the Short Story "The Skyjacker" in The Paris Review and continuing to the recently completed Semmelweis, the Women's Doctor. Feels like just the other day.-- A.V. - 03/2019.

Titles in ascending order:

The Mediterranean Runs Through Brooklyn

Valentino & the Great Italians

BART: a Life of A. Bartlett Giamatti

Anita Garibaldi, a Biography

Conversation with Johnny, a novel

Toni Cade Bambara's One Sicilian Night, a memoir

The Little Sailor, a Romantic Thriller

John Dante's Inferno, a Playboy's Life

IMMIGRANTS according to Anthony Valerio, Volumes 1 & 2

Semmelweis, the Women's Doctor

Proud to say all books are in print. They - digital & print editions - can be found on Amazon.com -- search Anthony Valerio. And each title has its own Facebook page which will be listed in the Works section. - - Anthony

Publisher's announcement of the first publication (e-book) of Anthony Valerio's Semmelweis, the Women's Doctor

Amazon.com -- Anthony Valerio

Except from Author's Note, Semmelweis, the Women's Doctor

I have attempted to present his life and work through his eyes, mind and heart. At the same time, experience as deeply as possible the horror of a new mother who contracted childbed fever in the days immediately after giving the gift of life. Her motherhood denied! Sudden farewell to her newborn! Attempting in a flash to see how he or she will turn out! Identifying with her pain, the pity. Unimaginable pain, for the post-partum "twilight sleep" of a combination of morphine and scopolamine, an amnesiac, would not be introduced until 60-odd years later. To comprehend the life of Ignaz Semmelweis, one must also plumb oneself, we children who survived.

...the hope is that today, around the world, at this moment, when one is passing surely one of millions of hand sanitizers and uses it to cleanse the hands, a thought can possibly go out to Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis and a fuller understanding, and appreciation, of his life and work.

About The Women's Doctor: Ignaz Semmelweis—

"In a global #metoo moment, Semmelweis should also have his place as someone who listened to women and, significantly, to their ailing bodies, even as the medical profession dismissed a common affliction killing women as a "woman's illness" and therefore not worthy of a place on the forefront of medicine. There is a photo circling the internet of the actor Patrick Stewart holding a sign with the Amnesty International seal. The caption for this image, presumably in Stewart's own words, is this: "People won't take you seriously unless you're an old white man, and since I'm an old white man I'm going to use that to help the people who need it." The sign Stewart is holding reads: Defend right for girls and women. Semmelweis, like Stewart, believed in embodied response, of putting one's body behind and into one's words. To be sure, Semmelweis was a pioneering physician and scientist whose accomplishments should be studied for their contributions to science. But he was also a feminist, and his work should be understood in that vein, also."--Ellen Nerenberg, Hollis Professor of Romance Languages & Literatures, Dean, Arts and Humanities. Wesleyan University

On a school outing with my 9 and 10-year-old classmates to the local cinema we saw a film about the life and work of Dr. Semmelweis. I knew about him, from school but even more from my parents; at home I read about famous Hungarian heroes, not just kings and warriors, but those ignored in their lifetime, whose work could have benefited all, children, women, and men. Our history, so full of tragedies like his, unrealized potential: failed reformers and inventors, scientists and artists embittered and ignored, driven to early death. –Akös Őstor, professor, author, filmmaker

Looking at and understanding someone like Semmelweis on a deep level and how he combated prejudices and prevailing thoughts and changed the way medicine is practiced is as relevant today as it was in the 1840s.—Prakash Sampath, M.D. Surgeon. President, Rhode Island Neurological Institute

kind words about SEMMELWEIS from professor Eric Goldman-

Valerio puts into practice as a non-fiction, imaginative biographer what Whitman did in his great poetry -- in Whitman's words, "putting myself here and now to the ambushed womb of the shadows."
Throughout V's career, he has been fascinated with those left in the shadows of greatness and full recognition -- those who deserve the light of an understanding, empathetic, humorous and historically and, more importantly, spiritually and psychologically precise author, so that their beauty and grace, and human fallibility, can also be passed down to future generations. Like Whitman, Valerio sees in the "shadows" of history not a grave, but a womb. And like a good obstetrician, or even like a father, brings forth from those margins of history the worthy individual obscured within, delivering him or her into the full light of history and to us. Here, in Semmelweiss, Valerio delivers into the light of our regard and sympathy a man who is more suited, in a sort of poetic justice, to be delivered from the womb of the shadows than any other--a man who devoted his life -- indeed, sacrificed it to the contumely of his petty and vain detractors, always the unjust punishment of gentle genuis-- to delivering women who were delivering babies, and then dying along with their babies -- delivering them, with all his might and soul, from what we now recognize as purpural fever -- childbed fever.

About Semmelweis, the Women's Doctor

by Prof. Eric Goldman

Anthony Valerio's Semmelweis doesn't just make you feel the thrill of hunting the cause of one of the most devastating diseases of the nineteenth century (puerperal fever, a major killer of pregnant women and newborns) with one of the great medical scientists of the nineteenth century, Ignaz Semmelweis. Even more powerfully, he brings readers to feel Semmelweis's frustration of actually finding the cause and the means of preventing it, but then not being able to save thousands of women dying of the disease because of the pride, vanity, and ignorance of the medical establishment.

Valerio's Semmelweis is no alienating genius who has from birth a special capacity for greatness that we can only witness and admire. Instead, Valerio impresses upon us how Semmelweis stumbles into greatness, almost against his will, into a mystery he feels both intellectually and, increasingly, morally responsible for solving. And then, Valerio renders the hardest part of Semmelweis's burden: his ethical responsibility to tell doctors that they are the cause of the epidemic of dead mothers and babies. Because Valerio so effectively allows us to identify with Semmelweis (we enter his painstaking logic and solve the mystery with him), his allies seem like our friends, too. Likewise, the ironic enemies of Semmelweis's discovery—the very doctors who are supposed to cure disease and protect the innocent from death—become the reader's enemies.

Valerio's book is an intimate and heartfelt letter of thanks and gratitude to one of history's great heroes. What makes Valerio's narrative biography so moving at both intellectual and emotional levels, though, is his ability to bring readers within Semmelweis's mind and heart, looking out with him both at a physical disease that tormented and destroyed so many women and children and, almost as bad, at a cultural disease of male pride and power that prevented Semmelweis's discovery and cure from saving so many victims. Readers feel like they are with Semmelweis in the hospital wards where women are dying mysteriously of puerperal fever. We feel with him as he hunts down the cause of the disease with observation and deductive reasoning. We share the exhilarating joy of discovering the cause and then, once the establishment resists the findings, and rejects the easy prevention of the disease, Semmelweis's initial outrage and anger. Though injustice meets Semmelweis at the end of his life, his personal battle to make doctors wash their hands largely lost, ultimately the scientific truth and power of Semmelweis's discovery prevail, as Valerio reminds us in the opening images of hand-sanitizer in modern-day hospitals.

Semmelweis is as intimate and personally engaging a narrative of a medical genius as anyone could possibly write. Valerio's book transcends, with its ability to allow readers into Semmelweis's amble heart and mind, mere biography and becomes, instead, a form of human autobiography.

link to Semmelweis, the Women's Doctor

"inspirational and very well written."

new edition ANITA GARIBALDI, a biography

cover design, Dave Barry

Quick Links

find Anita's print edition

also in digital

Anita Garibaldi, print edition

also found in digital form

About ANITA GARIBALDI, a Biography

"In Valerio's hand, Anita Garibaldi emerges as the courageous but vulnerable woman from Sao Paulo, Brazil, whose singular and precious spirit was caught in the times. Anita Garibaldi is a romance discovered in history's embrace. Valerio creates the Brazilian ethos in its emerald presence as the brilliant nerve in Garibaldi's brave but short time. This biography has a texture like a Renior film, broad and expansive, swimming along in voluble seas."-Afaa M. Weaver, poet, professor, scholar

Converse with Johnny in print edition

also in digital

About Conversation with Johnny

“Subsequent artistic attempts at humanizing the don include Analyze This and The Sopranos. Both of these productions feature don characters in therapy. Valero's use of the therapy device, though, is unique and visionary. It not only predates these films, but also shows the don in control, as therapist, not patient. This configuration emphasizes the power of Italian culture to nurture individual identity. Johnny, the don, serves as cultural nursemaid to the reborn Italian-American, Nicholas. “ Melus

A BEAM OF LIGHT THAT BENDS

by Professor Eric Goldman

The plot of Valerio's novel is refracted through a series of vignettes relayed through the narrator's conversations with an approachable mafia don (the titular Johnny) and the narrator's lover, a married woman nicknamed Lefty living a quiet life of married desperation (until she meets the narrator). Like a beam of sunlight that bends, separates into colors, and then reunites after passing through a variety of media, the narrator's conversations express a conflicted relationship with love (not only of women, he tells us, but "the way I view everything.")

The narrator, though preoccupied with universal questions, is resolutely, concretely Italian-American, and through his conversations with Johnny he engages both with the local meaning of this identity (in New York City) as well its larger temporal and geographical extensions: back in time to Garibaldi in Italy; across the ocean to Sicily and beyond. As one of the fictional narrators within the novel/autobiography says while musing over the confluence of the Hudson River and Atlantic Ocean, "For years I wondered exactly where the fresh water turns to salt." Key to this novel, and nowhere better or more beautifully articulated than the conversation that follows about how freshwater and saltwater fish both survive there, is the theme of immigration and dual identity. The novel, like the Hudson, is intimately "local" in its quotidian contact with Italian-American culture in New York, but never loses contact with the ocean that lies beyond, and is quite at ease moving just as intimately across the Atlantic – and not only across space but across time – to various locales in Italy. And then there are the imaginary locales of Nicholas's (the narrator's) memory and desire, which add the third dimension of imagination to Valerio's invented autobiography.

If this sounds "literary" (unfortunately this term is a pejorative in some circles), it is also winningly funny, full of the wise humor of Valerio's narrator Nicholas, who is a persona of the engaging writer himself. Though the fragmented plot and shifts between different conversations and locales is at first challenging for readers seeking a more traditional linear novel, Valerio's Conversations has a seductive power that does its work subtly and silently, so after it ends you will feel, without really understanding why, like a silence has fallen after a long-lost friend has departed. And the fact that this is accomplished not through an operatic voice but through a series of apparently desultory conversations is an impressive feat of Valerio's dialogic style.