An Offer We Can't Refuse: The Mafia in the Mind of America

by George De Stefano

A provocative and entertaining look at the mafia, the media, and the (un)making of Italian Americans.

As evidenced in countless films, novels, and television portrayals, the Mafia has maintained an enduring hold on the American cultural imagination--even as it continues to wrongly color our real-life perception of Italian Americans. In An Offer We Can't Refuse, George De Stefano takes a close look at the origins and prevalence of the Mafia mythos in America.

Beginning with a consideration of Italian emigration in the early twentieth century and the fear and prejudice--among both Americans and Italians--that informed our earliest conception of what was at the time the largest immigrant group to enter the United States, De Stefano explores how these impressions laid the groundwork for the images so familiar to us today and uses them to illuminate and explore the variety and allure of Mafia stories--from Coppola's romanticized paeans to Scorsese's bloody realism to the bourgeois world of David Chase's Sopranos--while discussing the cultural richness often contained in these works.

De Stefano addresses the lingering power of the goodfella cliché and the lamentable extent to which it is embedded in our consciousness, making it all but impossible to green-light a project about the Italian American experience not set in gangland.

"Invites Italian-Americans of all backgrounds to the family table to discuss how mob-related movies and television shows have affected the very notion of what their heritage still means in the 21st century." -- Allen Barra, The New York Sun

Genres: Nonfiction, History

448 pages, Paperback

First published January 10, 2006

About the author

I am a journalist and critic living in Long Island City, NY. I am the author of "An Offer We Can't Refuse: The Mafia in the Mind of America" (Faber & Faber/ Farrar,Straus,Giroux). The book explores the origins and development of "The Mafia Myth," one of the longest-running shows in American popular culture. The book has been well-reviewed; Kirkus called it "a whip-smart meditation on the power of ethnic myth." "

Reviews

[Fraser Sherman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Of Italian ancestry, De Stefano admits to being somewhat conflicted about gangster films — he hates the stereotype of Italian = Mafia, but he also loves THE GODFATHER for presenting some of the most truly Italian characters he's ever seen on screen. De Stefano looks at how the image of the vast monolithic Mafia cartel (as opposed to a bunch of mob families, mixed in with other ethnic groups such as the Irish and Jewish mobs) never matched the reality, and how even now that the Italian crime families are crumbling the "mafia" term still has punch (so we get the Russian mafia, the Chinese mafia or social groups such as the "Oberlin mafia"). Even so he has little sympathy for the "the only bigotry that's acceptable is against Italian Americans" pointing out how much worse other groups get it. Good job.

[Edward Stevens · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent and original study of the history of the "Mafia myth" in American pop culture from early films like "Little Caesar" and "Scarface" to "The Sopranos." The author covers a lot of ground, from southern Italian immigration to the US to the origins of the Mafia in Sicily to the current state of Italian organized crime, along the way comparing historical fact with representation of Italians and Italian Anmericans, in books, movies, TV shows and even pop music. He also does something I've never seen before in any book about the Mafia and its pop culture images -- analyze themes of class, race, and sexuality. Highly recommended for its historical insight and sharp cultural analysis.

[Nicole C. (using StoryGraph more these days) · Rating 3 out of 5]

A must-read for anyone interested in the "mafia culture" portrayed in movies such as The Godfather trilogy and shows like The Sopranos; both of the aforementioned merit their own chapters in the book. Totally engrossing and written in an engaging style