Gomorrah
Italy's Other Mafia
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- 5,99 €
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- 5,99 €
Publisher Description
From the author of ZeroZeroZero comes Gomorrah, a bold and engrossing piece of investigative writing and one heroic young man's impassioned story of a place under the rule of a murderous organization.
With a preface to mark the ten year anniversary of publication, Roberto Saviano's groundbreaking and utterly compelling book is a major international bestseller which has to date sold 750,000 copies in Italy alone.
A groundbreaking study and a searing exposé, Gomorrah is the astonishing true story of the renowned crime organization the Camorra, known by insiders as ‘the System’. With a global reach, large stakes in construction, high fashion, illegal drugs and toxic waste disposal, the Camorra exerts a malign grip on cities and villages along the Neapolitan coast.
In pursuit of his subject, Roberto Saviano worked as an assistant at a Chinese textile manufacturer and on a construction site, both controlled by 'the System', and as a waiter at a Camorra wedding. Born in Naples, he recalls seeing his first murder at the age of fourteen, and how his own father, a doctor, suffered a brutal beating for trying to help an eighteen-year-old victim, left for dead in the street. Since publishing the author has received so many death threats from the Camorra that he has been assigned police protection.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Saviano has created a perfectly realized, morally compelling journey through the brutal world of contemporary Italian mob life in this ceaselessly violent tale of the Camorra, a network of thugs, exploiters and killers who run Naples and the surrounding countryside. Armed with a police band radio, Saviano visits one crime scene after another, recording the final words and circumstances of the dying and dead. The murders described are savage, cruel and senseless: "The head... hadn't been cut off with a hatchet, a clean blow, but with a metal grinder: the kind of circular saw welders use to polish soldering. The worst possible tool, and thus the most obvious choice." Jewiss's translation of Saviano's intense prose flows beautifully from the pestilence and degradation of everyday life in the teeming Neapolitan slums to the futile efforts of the police to control the rich, organic chaos that is the only way the Camorra know how to live. A stunning achievement, this is a must-read for anyone interested in the state of contemporary Europe.
