Blog readers know I’ve been obsessing this summer over the causes of southern Italian underdevelopment. One obvious hypothesis blames the relative poverty of southern Italy on organized crime.
Social historian Frank Snowden offers a very different route to an answer about Southern Italy in his meticulously researched and convincingly argued book, The Conquest of Malaria: Italy, 1900-1962: epidemiological, not economic.
What is a woman to do with herself? That question has inspired probably hundreds of thousands of novels over the past 200 years, but never with more triumphant result than in George Eliot’s Middlemarch.
If Aristotle is right that tragedy produces feelings of pity and terror, then Max Hastings' Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, 1944-45 rates among the most tragic books I have ever read.