by Philip Cannistraro & Brian Sullivan ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 19, 1993
A dry but well-informed account of the woman behind Mussolini's rise to power, by Cannistraro (History and Politics/Drexel University) and Sullivan (Senior Fellow/National Defense University). Margherita Sarfatti, an art critic and daughter of an influential Venetian Jewish family, was, according to the authors, a Svengali figure to the rough-hewn Mussolini. Beginning her affair with the future dictator (``My absurd lover, tyrannical and adored!'') in 1911, she became known as his ``inspiratrice,'' directing his reading (Proudhon and Machiavelli, among others), bolstering his belief in his greatness, and helping him to mold his vision of a new Roman Empire. Though an ardent socialist, Sarfatti supported Italian involvement in WW I, an action that got her expelled from the Socialist Party. After the war, she and Mussolini worked together to forge the Fascist Party from two unlikely allies, the nationalists and socialists, and watched their creation grow to power, nourished by conditions of mass unemployment, street-fighting, and demagoguery given credibility by electoral success. Sarfatti, the authors contend, had ``a far more flexible and inventive political imagination'' than Mussolini, and she was a central figure during these formative years—yet her affair with the dictator, and her influence, waned during the early 30's. In 1938, in the face of Il Duce's growing anti-Semitism, Sarfatti fled to Argentina with two suitcases full of jewels and modern art, treasures that she later parlayed into a position as one of the most important art collectors of the mid-century. She died in Italy in 1961. The authors devote too much space to Sarfatti's career as an art critic and promoter of Italian-American ties; still, hers is a remarkable, sometimes tragic, tale. (Photos.)
Pub Date: March 19, 1993
ISBN: 0-688-06299-7
Page Count: 550
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1993
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by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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by William Strunk & E.B. White ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 15, 1972
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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