A history of the Italian family who mounted an intrepid campaign against Mussolini.
After World War I, fascism took hold in war-torn Italy, culminating in the rise of 39-year-old Mussolini as the nation’s youngest prime minister. In 1922, supported by the royal family, the Vatican, and about 25,000 well-trained Blackshirts, Mussolini, demanding “full powers” to lead, faced weak opposition by socialists, communists, and liberals. In an absorbing, well-documented narrative, historian Moorehead (Village of Secrets: Defying the Nazis in Vichy France, 2014, etc.) focuses on the Rosselli family—brothers Carlo and Nello and their mother, Amelia—who became tireless leaders of an anti-fascist movement that grew in strength as Mussolini’s reign of terror intensified. “Fascism,” writes the author, “quickly spread its tentacles over the fabric of Italian life. The army, the aristocracy, the Church and industry, all were rallying to defend the rights of a usurper.” Drawing on thousands of family letters as well as biographies of Mussolini and histories of the period, Moorehead powerfully depicts the family’s anger and despair as Italy succumbed to what Carlo called “an enormous black plague.” Although at first some anti-fascists hoped that Mussolini, who was “boastful, vain, cruel and erratic,” would fail on his own, it soon became clear that they needed to wage a real battle. By 1927, Mussolini had abolished elections and installed himself as minister “of foreign affairs, of the interior, of war, of the navy and air force, and of corporations.” Textbooks were rewritten and journalists fired if they showed “aversion” to fascism. Anti-fascists grew stronger, with Carlo standing as “the most prominent leader of the non-communist anti-fascist opposition.” The author chronicles the efforts by Carlo and Nello that led to repeated arrests and incarcerations on Italy’s prison islands. When he was released, Carlo took up a frantic pace of writing and speeches, traveling to Paris, London, and, during the Spanish Civil War, Spain. Constantly in Mussolini’s cross hairs, the brothers finally were assassinated: 200,000 people followed their funeral procession.
A vivid portrait of resistance in dark, perilous times that is not without contemporary relevance.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-230830-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
Did you like this book?
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
Did you like this book?
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
Did you like this book?
© Copyright 2022 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
