John Keahey

A Sweet and Glorious Land: Revisiting the Ionian Sea

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sweetlandcover_200In the winter of 1897, Victorian writer George Gissing made a well-chronicled journey throughout southern Italy. The result was a book, By the Ionian Sea, which was published in 1901 and has since become a classic in travel literature.

A hundred years later, award-winning newspaper journalist John Keahey sets off to retrace Gissing’s footsteps. His goal is to compare and contrast the two Italys, seeing first-hand all the changes that have occurred over the past century. From train rides through the lush countryside to the crisp mountain air of Cantanzaro, Keahey paints a beautiful and compelling picture of one of the most popular parts of the country.

A Sweet and Glorious Land is not only a wonderful travelogue but also an intriguing history of Italy and its people.

Venice Against the Sea: A City Besieged

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venicecover_200Venice is sinking – six feet over the past 1,000 years.

The reasons for this are many. Although there is a natural geologic tendency for some sinking, humans have exacerbated the problem by exploiting on a massive scale underground water resources for industrial purposes. Coupled with these events – and perhaps most significant – are climatic changes all over the globe. The heating of the atmosphere after the last ice age, dramatically speeded up by humans, has led to a steady, continuing rise in sea level. This global warming is likely to persist beyond human control for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.

Venetians, other Italians, and many in the world community are locked in debate over Venice’s plight. Venice Against the Sea explains how the city and its 177 canals were built and what has led up to this long-foreseen crisis. It explores the various options currently being considered for “solving” this problem and chronicles the ongoing debate among scientists, engineers, and politicians about the pros and cons of each potential solution.

Through extensive research and interviews, award-winning journalist John Keahey has written the definitive book on this fascinating problem. No matter what the experts decide to do, one thing is for certain – Venice’s art, its buildings, and its history are too important to the planet’s cultural identity to let it slip beneath the rising waters of the Adriatic.

Advance praise for Hidden Tuscany

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“Travel writer John Keahey (Seeking Sicily) delivers another insightful look at the wonders of Italy, this time focusing on the coastal areas of western Tuscany to discover places most Americans “quickly pass through en route to somewhere else… This is not a guidebook, but Keahey succeeds completely at producing a book that lovingly describes the beauty of the region at the same time that it embodies what Keahey feels is the best ‘guide to being a traveler: pick a direction, carry a map so you know how to get back to your resting place each evening, and set out each morning with no agenda.'”
–Publishers Weekly (Read full review)

“Keahey fully understands the art of taking the road less traveled—a solid addition to his body of work.”
–Kirkus Reviews (Read full review)

“A detailed and enthusiastic introduction to Tuscany’s coastal areas, this book will come as an intriguing surprise to many who thought they knew the region well.”
–Mary Taylor Simeti, author of Persephone’s Island and Travels with a Medieval Queen

“Better than a guide book, Hidden Tuscany offers us close-ups of the cities and villages of western Tuscany and puts us in touch with the people who live there.”
–Robert Hellenga, author of The Sixteen Pleasures and Fall of the Sparrow

“Every landscape hides a story, and it is the travel writer’s task to find it. John Keahey reveals a Tuscany starkly different from Merchant Ivory period films, a Tuscany of marble quarries and sulfur springs, medieval towns and Etruscan necropolises, poisonous marshes and prehistoric archipelagos, and cattle country as wild and wooly as any in the American West. Shaped by time and tide, scarred by war and haunted by exile, this is a Tuscany of stark contrasts. Dazzling sunflowers clash with somber cypresses, while local seafood evokes the ghost of the drowned poet Percy Shelley. Keahey wrote this book ‘to engender a spirit of discovery’ in readers. He succeeds spectacularly. His prose is as chiseled and polished as the finest Carrara.”
–Anthony Di Renzo, author of Bitter Greens and Trinàcria: A Tale of Bourbon Sicily

“If you’ve never explored the western part of Tuscany—and few people have—John Keahey’s Hidden Tuscany will make you want to run for the next flight. From the marble shops of Pietrasanta to the ruins of the Sant’Anna di Stazzema massacre to the remote villages in the Maremma, Keahey takes us on a cultural, historical and mouth-watering gastronomical journey through one of the most fascinating regions in all of Italy. Part personal journal and part guide, this is a book to treasure—and to take along when you make that trip. ”
–Paul Salsini, award-winning author of The Cielo

Hidden Tuscany: Discovering Art, Culture and Memories in a Well-Known Region’s Unknown Places

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Hidden TuscanyHidden Tuscany vividly displays the coastal areas of Tuscany, a territory often overlooked by visitors to Italy eager to see Chianti, Florence or Siena. Veteran journalist and Italophile John Keahey points out the keen distinctions that the western cities maintain: in food, lifestyle, and the way its artists are paving new directions in art that differ mightily from the Renaissance-rich interior.

Keahey interviews sculptors and their artigiani, craftsmen and women who toil in the marble studios, eating their lunch in workers’ clubs and cafes. From beach locales such as Viareggio, to Livorno (which has Venetian-style canals), modern Orbetello and the seven islands of the Tuscan Archipelago, Keahey reveals beaches rich in European visitors and magnificent medieval villages that rarely see outsiders. The larger, better-known Tuscan coastal city Pisa can even surprise a curious visitor with places of solitude.Keahey’s previous books on Italy have always received widespread and complimentary review coverage—garnering praise for the depth of his research and his comprehensive analysis. Travelers instantly flock to books about Tuscany, and this one promotes towns and villages that are often missed by tourists, letting readers in on these “secret” destinations. For armchair travelers or vacation seekers, Hidden Tuscany puts a very human face on the region in Keahey’s discussion of food, history and language. And the result is mesmerizing.

John Keahey is a veteran newspaper and wire-service journalist who spent forty-five years in and around journalism. He retired in 2011 after twenty-two years as a reporter and news editor for The Salt Lake Tribune. He has a history degree from the University of Utah and spends as much time as possible in Italy.

Reviews of Seeking Sicily

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National Geographic Traveler: Book of the Month

At one point in John Keahey’s new book about Sicily, a Sicilian-born poet friend tries to explain the islanders’ character: “We are not south of Italy; we are north of Africa!” This simple, perspective-spinning declaration is typical of the insights Keahey presents in this impassioned and learned account.
With extensive details and a fond admiration of its people, Keahey effectively articulates why the people of this charming island “are Sicilians before they are Italians, and why no amount of time under the control of Rome will ever change that.”
(Read the full review: http://travel.nationalgeographic.com/travel/traveler-magazine/trip-lit/seeking-sicily/)

— November/December, 2011

Kirkus Book Reviews

Veteran newspaperman Keahey continues his exploration of Italian civilization with an appreciation of the rich, vibrant surroundings of Italy’s largest autonomous island.
Having previously explored both the Ionian Sea region and the disastrous fate of an ever-sinking Venice (Venice Against the Sea: A City Besieged, 2002), the author turns his journalistic eye toward Sicily, a “strange, magnificent, brooding island.” Keahey meticulously observes the history, colorful customs and culture of Sicilians with boundless curiosity. He climbs the rickety scaffolding in capital city Palermo to capture the best view of the palazzo compound of taciturn Sicilian novelist Giuseppe di Lampedusa. He shares a stroll through a cuisine cornucopia at Vucciria marketplace and observes the region’s many unwieldy, grandiose festivals and processions honoring patron saints and Easter Week.
After illuminating the island’s varying economic strata, Keahey retraces the fascinating history of village squares once used for public burnings and the restoration of a local prison. Some of his sightseeing is informally guided by indigenous “Siciliani,” an assemblage of prideful natives whose characteristics the author describes with the same spirited deliberation as chapters on myths, food, native dialects and the histrionics of the Sicilian Mafiosi. In a superbly sensory chapter, Keahey marvels at variations in Sicilian cuisine with mouthwatering descriptions flooding the pages of this lush travelogue.
With extensive details and a fond admiration of its people, Keahey effectively articulates why the people of this charming island “are Sicilians before they are Italians, and why no amount of time under the control of Rome will ever change that.”

— October 1, 2011

Publishers Weekly

“When travel writer Keahey first visited Sicily in 1986, he discovered that it hardly resembled the bucolic images of peasant men and women hauling huge piles of newly harvested grapes or of donkey carts carrying oversized milk cans. Disappointed, he began his search for the Sicily of an earlier era and found it in the pages of numerous 19th- and early 20th-century novelists and essayists.
“Seeking to understand better the richness of Sicilian culture and its 3,000-year history, Keahey visited Sicily four times between March 2009 and March 2010 to see the island in various seasons. He sets out to capture Sicily through conversations with islanders and by studying their writers and their myths. For example, Keahey weaves Giovanni Verga’s short stories about the carts used to carry people on rough 19th-century roads with the story of Franco Bertolino, the last of the traditional Sicilian cart painters; Bertolino is at once nostalgic and resigned to this closing chapter of Sicilian history.
“Keahey ranges widely over topics from language and festivals to food and the Mafia. He points out that the Sicilian language has no future tense, surmising that was likely due to Sicilians having long been occupied by other empires and had no hope of having an independent future.
“Keahey’s journey is a rich guide to the culture and history of Sicily.”

— August 8, 2011

Seeking Sicily: A Cultural Journey through Myth and Reality in the Heart of the Mediterranean

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Seeking SicilySeeking Sicily: A Cultural Journey through Myth and Reality in the Heart of the Mediterranean is the title of John’s next book, a travel narrative that captures Sicily and its various cultures through his eyes and the eyes of Sicilian authors of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, most notably Leonardo Sciascia (1921-1989) of Racalmuto, province of Agrigento.

John Keahey has written four books about Italy, all published by Thomas Dunne Books: A Sweet and Glorious Land, Venice Against the Sea, and Seeking Sicily. He is an amateur historian with a particular interest in the lands of the Mediterranean Sea and areas surrounding the Black Sea. John is an Idaho native, reared in the once-small community of Nampa. He was a reporter and news editor for The Salt Lake Tribune for twenty-two years. He worked for a handful of small newspapers in Idaho and Utah and at United Press International in Salt Lake City. For one fifteen-year period away from his first love, journalism, he served as a spokesman for the University of Utah Health Sciences Center and for the energy company Questar Corp. He holds history and marketing degrees from the University of Utah. John is married to Connie Disney, a freelance book designer. John has a son and a daughter.