Reviews for Silvio Berlusconi: Television, Power and Patrimony

The average rating for Silvio Berlusconi: Television, Power and Patrimony based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-04-22 00:00:00 Darin vandeventer Ginsborg tells the fascinating story of Silvio Berlusconi's rise to power from ordinary roots to the Prime Minister of Italy (it leaves off at 2004, unfortunately). Though it is really the story of how charismatic individuals, whether in media or in politics (or in Berlusconi's case both) persuade us, distracting us from terrible, structural problems they claim to fix. We see ourselves in them, and the fashion-conscious, high-tech consumerism they represent. It is amazing to read that some of Berlusconi's biggest supporters were women with cash reserves taking their cues from the kind of cheap, televised entertainment he provides. Democracy works best when its power is diffused through institutions. History shows that if power can actually be located it will be stormed. It is this diffusion of power that makes democracy look messy. Contrary to this are the minutemen and women who need personalities, current affairs, conflicts, dramas mini and macro, verbal duels. The stuff of reality television. You tell it like it is to whoever needs to hear it. Sometimes they actually respond. Change in democracy is slow for a very good reason. But all these problem-solvers do not want to hear it. Play it safe and aim for high profits. Pay fierce attention to levels of audience share, and mark your progress. If the people have insatiable acquisitive tendencies why should they be denied? Somehow the media and the kind of talk that corresponds to it is equated with democracy now, while the kind of work which requires research, town meetings, voting and non-violent change in power, observation over time instead of following the trends, is not considered democracy anymore. At least not to those who find the Berlusconis of the world so fascinating while followers of the magnates claim, loudly, that "the media" is the problem. Almost on cue the book ends with Berlusconi getting a face-lift. ________ On a side note, this survey of Italian politics and culture feels like it has been covered well in Ferrante's novels. Here is much of the detail she dramatizes including the shadiness and corruption. Remarkably, this excellent historian almost feels redundant when compared to an artist covering the same territory. Why should this surprise me?

Review # 2 was written on 2007-11-21 00:00:00 Joseph Jumaoas 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.