A caustic but unpersuasive case for breaking Italy apart.
A vitriolic separatist says it’s time for Italy’s northern regions to declare independence from “a lazy and spendthrift South.”
The author neatly divides his native land into two polar-opposite halves: Northern Italy, including his Veneto region, he argues, is full of hardworking, law-abiding, tax-paying, civic-minded paragons; southern Italy, however—Sicily, Calabria, Basilicata, Campania, Molise and Puglia—is a cesspool of sloth, venality and organized crime where inhabitants survive mainly by parasitizing government budgets funded by northern taxpayers. Drawing on press reports, Giuliano rehashes a long litany of southern crimes and outrages: Mafia assassinations and extortions; squalid hospitals whose budgets are siphoned off to corruption and whose patients are routinely killed by incompetent doctors and nurses; lousy schools that give diplomas to illiterates; judicial bribery; illegal dumping of toxic waste; insurance fraud, welfare fraud, tax fraud, accounting fraud, all kinds of fraud. The rot is spreading to all of Italy, the author warns, carried by southerners who dominate national politics, the legal profession and public administration like some kind of occupying army. The author insists that the only hope for victimized northerners is political autonomy, complete with the refounding of the old Venetian Republic. Giuliano’s heated rejoinder to Italy’s long-running debate over the Southern Question disavows any racist sentiment but traffics in the broadest of stereotypes, harping on the irreconcilable cultural divide between the “Germanic” heritage of northern Italians and the alleged Middle-Eastern background of southerners. But he goes beyond sectional and ethnic animosities to mount an omnidirectional attack on almost every institution and political actor in Italy, inveighing against communists on the left, former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi on the right, and even “the absurd and intolerable privileges of the Vatican.” The abuses Giuliano spotlights are real and dire, and his jeremiad, though one-sided, illustrates the widely shared anguish over Italy’s manifold dysfunctions. Unfortunately, the problematic prose greatly weakens his scattershot critique; repetitive, disorganized and riddled with errors of grammar, syntax and idiom, the English translation needs serious editing.
A caustic but unpersuasive case for breaking Italy apart.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2012
ISBN: 978-1477218211
Page Count: 168
Publisher: AuthorHouseUK
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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