William Wilberforce Book

The world is chaotic; our lives, and the lives of those around us unfold with an arbitrary imprecision. Sometimes, in order to render our impressions into a matériel accessible to reason, we will cast into a single human actor the collective biography of a time and place. It is with a sense of this understandable necessity that one can say that Silvio Berlusconi is not a man'he is an effect, the familiar immensity of a tidal wave, akin to the assumed god behind the solar eclipse in the era before clockwork stars.

One may consider SB the yang of many recent political events in Italy. According to the author of Silvio Berlusconi: Television, Power and Patrimony that yang's complementary yin is Italy's long tradition of clientelistic practices and priority of family structures over those of the state. Berlusconi's actions are examined with an eye as to what in society allowed him to tilt the results of Italy's democracy towards a less than democratic outcome. The author examines failures of the left: an inability to understand their duty, build an effective coalition, and respond to threats. They take part in their own defeat, and are not merely victims of a malignant politics combined with an unfortunate time.

I read this book while waiting for the more recent The Sack of Rome: How a Beautiful European Country with a Fabled History and a Storied Culture Was Taken Over by a Man Named Silvio Berlusconi to come out in a paperback edition. (I finally broke down and got the hardcover.) Both books are good. Neither one moots the other'and both treat both the how and why of SB's acts'but the book reviewed here ponders more about Italian society, while the book mentioned earlier in this paragraph more examines the practices and techniques that put the sizzle in SB's steak. If you like one, read the other; if you like the other, read the one.