Books: Old Wine, New Bottle

MOUNT ALLEGRO —Jerre Mangione—Houghton MiffIin ($2.50).

Mount Allegro is the modest, unassuming, sensitive record of a young U.S. writer of Sicilian descent. It is no towering peak in U.S. letters, but readers who make the climb can get a clear view of a relatively unexplored part of the native scene— America's "Little Italys" and the people who live in them.

To the U.S., during the first decade of the 20th Century, came more than 2,000,000 Italians, part of history's greatest population movement.* Rootless and adrift in the New World, they formed "foreign language"...