Beauty and the Inferno
Essays
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Essays on art, politics and life from the best-selling author of Gomorrah
Gomorrah, Roberto Saviano’s 2006 exposé of Naples’s Camorra mafia, was an international bestseller and became an award-winning film. But the death threats that followed forced the author into hiding. Saviano was ostracized by his countrymen and went on the run, changing his location every few months and compelled to keep perpetual company with his bodyguards. To this day, he lives in an undisclosed location.
The loneliness of the fugitive life informs the essays in Beauty and the Inferno. Among other subjects, he writes about the legendary South African jazz singer Miriam Makeba, his meeting with the real-life Donnie Brasco, sharing the Nobel Academy platform with Salman Rushdie, and the murdered Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya. Present throughout the book is a sense of Saviano’s peculiar isolation, which infuses his words with anger, exceptional insight and tragedy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This book collects Italian journalist Saviano's writings from the years following his 2006 Gomorrah, a landmark expose of the Camorra mafia whose publication forced him into hiding and even periodically required him to live in police barracks. The subjects of these essays range from cocaine to concrete, but nearly all Saviano's writing is filtered through the lens of mafia activity in Italy. The book also contains some excellent sports writing and several fine character studies. These feel out of place among Saviano's more political work, but his interest is always passionate, and his commitment to his subjects draws the reader in. Saviano also writes feelingly of his own struggle to adapt to the restrictions that keep him safe in his post-Gomorrah life. He is clearly outraged at what he regards as the complacency of Italian society in the face of the mafia activity, and the resulting essays are often vivid calls to action. He champions integrity artistic, personal, and political and his commitment to truth and to honoring his subjects is compelling. Some sentences run long and border on overwrought, but this may reflect the difficulty of translation more than anything else. Regardless of occasional dips in the quality of the prose, this is a strong collection from a brave and keen-eyed reporter.
