Reviews for La città degli ebrei

The average rating for La città degli ebrei based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-01-04 00:00:00 James Hoffine I picked this up from a display at work because my wife and I are vacationing in Sicily this summer. I'm a little embarrassed that the first book I read in preparation for the trip is about the Mafia, but who am I kidding? Sicily is a fascinating place, a cultural crossroads with few equivalents on Earth, but my longtime fascination has everything to do with The Godfather. I read the (kinda lousy) book in high school, already obsessed with the sublime (well, the first two) movies. I was particularly interested, in the book, in the old-timers, the guys like Vito, who were called (never, I would imagine, to their faces) Mustache Petes, and in their quasi-medieval Sicilian milieu. Mafia and Mafiosi is a German sociology monograph from the 70s , a classic, if the cover blurbs are to be believed. While it frequently lapses into the unreadability and self-importance that I have come to expect from academic prose and, in particular, from perpetrators of social 'science,' it contains, amid its gaseous generalizations and infantile 'sociograms,' a vivid portrait of the essentially feudal culture that survived in Sicily until the Second World War. The uomini di rispetto, in their place of origin, were not criminals. They were, in a sense, The Only Law West of the Pecos. The endless series of conquests that constitutes Sicilian history resulted in a population with no investment in the apparatus of government, and mafia arose as what Hess calls a 'self-help' solution to the power vacuum. A traditional Sicilian mafioso wasn't a member of an avowedly criminal organization, let alone an acolyte in a mysterious secret society; he represented a communal behavioral ideal - the man who would suffer no insult and who was willing to use violence to further his (mostly legitimate) business ends.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-11-02 00:00:00 Richard McCormick So many Mafia histories are written to the same outline, regardless of their focus. Hess' book is an exception. My area of interest is Mafia organization---what shape a Mafia cosca takes, the shape of the network that connects cosche, its resemblance to and reliance upon the family. Hess devotes himself to describing and defining terms the rest of us have been throwing around: words like "mafia" and "mafioso." Even when talking about gangsters who are a poor fit, his is still the best resource for describing a subject as more or less meeting a classic and accepted definition. A must read for anyone with a serious interest in Mafia studies.