Naples '44: A World War II Diary of Occupied Italy |
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Naples '44: A World War II Diary of Occupied Italy
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by Norman Lewis
Sales Rank: 35270
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List Price: $14.95
$14.95
At Amazon
on 6-23-2008.
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Features
Cover Type: Paperback with 192 pages
Published by: Da Capo Press January 2, 2005
Written in: English
ISBN 10 Number: 0786714387
ISBN 13 Number: 978-0786714384
Book Dimensions:
8.3 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
Weighs: 8.8 ounces
Product Description
As a young intelligence officer stationed in Naples following its liberation from Nazi forces, Norman Lewis recorded the lives of a proud and vibrant people forced to survive on prostitution, thievery, and a desperate belief in miracles and cures. The most popular of Lewis's twenty-seven books, Naples '44 is a landmark poetic study of the agony of wartime occupation and its ability to bring out the worst, and often the best, in human nature. In prose both heartrending and comic, Lewis describes an era of disillusionment, escapism, and hysteria in which the Allied occupiers mete out justice unfairly and fail to provide basic necessities to the populace while Neapolitan citizens accuse each other of being Nazi spies, women offer their bodies to the same Allied soldiers whose supplies they steal for sale on the black market, and angry young men organize militias to oppose "temporary" foreign rule. Yet over the chaotic din, Lewis sings intimately of the essential dignity of the Neapolitan people, whose traditions of civility, courage, and generosity of spirit shine through daily. This essential World War II book is as timely a read as ever.
Publisher Description
5 1.5-hour cassettes
--This text refers to the
Audio Cassette
edition.
Reader Reviews
This review is from: Naples '44: An Intelligence Officer in the Italian Labyrinth (Transaction Large Print Books) (Hardcover)
This is quite possibly the best book about World War II AND the best book about Italy you're likely to find... Full of striking telling detail from the opening confusion of the Allied invasion on the beaches of Salerno (the author, a young British intelligence officer posted to Italy behind his knowledge of Spanish, finds himself under fire in a wilderness of typewriters and other randomly strewn office equipment) to the improbable eruption of Vesuvius (and the Neapolitans' belief, amply demonstrated by historical prededent, that otherwise inexorable flows of lava could be stopped by the relics of Catholic saints)... Lewis is a master observer of the particular and this book, written after a mid-1950s perusal of his old wartime notebooks following publication of half a dozen other volumes, shows off his unmatched gift for quiet understatement. The residents of Naples were reduced to medieval conditions of famine and hygiene and were heartily sick of the war in 1944, prostitution was rampant with young girls often the only employables in a family, electric lines and even manholes were plundered for their scrap value. A clandestine mail service between Naples and still-Nazi-occupied Rome was a particular vexation to Lewis and his intelligence collegues, especially as some of Naples' most prominent citizens (including a midget gynecologist who was able to use both hands for non-incision internal surgery, and who specialized in restoration of virginity), were among the amateur postmen. The doings of Lucky Luciano and other characters on the late-WWII scene in Italy, and the incredible bungling and callousness of the occupation authorities are ably chronicled. Don't miss this one.
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Naples '44: A World War II Diary of Occupied Italy
Available from Amazon
Price: $14.95
Updated on 6-23-2008.
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