The Dark Heart of Italy
Author: Tobias Jones
In 1999 Tobias Jones immigrated to Italy, expecting to discover the pastoral bliss described by centuries of foreign visitors. Instead, he found a very different country: one besieged by unfathomable terrorism and deep-seated paranoia. The Dark Heart of Italy is Jones's account of his four-year voyage across the Italian peninsula.
Jones writes not just about Italy's art, climate, and cuisine but also about the much livelier and stranger sides of the Bel Paese: the language, soccer, Catholicism, cinema, television, and terrorism. Why, he wonders, does the parliament need a "slaughter commission"? Why do bombs still explode every time politics start getting serious? Why does everyone urge him to go home as soon as possible, saying that Italy is a "brothel"? Most of all, why does one man, Silvio Berlusconi-in the words of a famous song-appear to own everything from Padre Nostro (Our Father) to Cosa Nostra (the Mafia)?
The Italy that emerges from Jones's travels is a country scarred by civil wars and "illustrious corpses"; a country that is proudly visual rather than verbal, based on aesthetics rather than ethics; a country where crime is hardly ever followed by punishment; a place of incredible illusionism, where it is impossible to distinguish fantasy from reality and fact from fiction.
The New Yorker
In 1999, Jones moved to Italy, and he explores his adoptive country with a loving, sometimes cynical, always questioning eye. He points out that the word storia means both “history” and “story,” and that the distinction is not always clear. Themes and subjects recur in his quest for understanding: soccer, language, and, above all, the grandiose figure of the prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi. He is attuned to the perspective of the ordinary citizens he meets in bars and post-office lines, but he also gets behind the surface, providing neat background summaries of such phenomena as the “clean hands” investigations of the nineties, the Vatican finance scandals of the seventies, and why Italian TV is as bad as it is. While he finds Italy “infuriating and endlessly irritating,” he can’t imagine leaving, because “life seems less exciting outside Italy.”
Publishers Weekly
With his first book, Jones must now be admitted to the company of writers such as Alexander Stille and Tim Parks who seem to understand Italy and the Italians better than the natives do themselves. Jones excels at writing about the passions aroused on the soccer field and the dirty machinations in the club offices in an entertaining chapter entitled "Penalties and Impunity." He realizes, though, that soccer is just a manifestation of a deeper, lurking cancer: Italy's dismal mediacracy. It all began in the wake of "Tangentopoli," the massive corruption scandal in the early 1990s that brought down a regime that included the eternally powerful Christian Democrats and their partners in a Faustian pact, the Socialists. Into this political vacuum stepped the irrepressible owner of the country's most successful soccer club, A.C. Milan, Silvio Berlusconi. He built a media empire that now touches every aspect of daily life in Italy; his presence hovers over Italians much as Big Brother hovers over 1984 and his visage looms over a typical Italian town on the book's cover. But Berlusconi, writes Jones, although on the political scene for a decade, is a relatively recent chapter in the sordid history of Italy. Jones does a fine job of explicating (as much as it can be explicated) the murky history of neo-fascist, right-wing and Mafia intrigues against the Italian Republic after WWII. On a lighter note, he playfully dissects the Italians' obsession with beauty and eroticism. Jones, who had been on the staff of the London Review of Books, moved to Parma in 1999 and has developed a sincere and profound love of Italy and the Italians. Agent, Georgina Capel. (June) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
Tobias Jones left his native England to live in Italy in the 1990s. His The Dark Heart of Italy: An Incisive Portrait of Europe's Most Beautiful, Most Disconcerting Country (North Point: Farrar. 2004. ISBN 0-86547-700-0. $24) portrays an Italy that is far more complex than is usually depicted in guidebooks or travel essays. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Expatriate's debut memoir, in which Italian culture postures, disappoints, and still makes life more exciting than anywhere else. Sound familiar? This belongs to the venerable genre featuring a protagonist who goes to live in a foreign land, learns the language, delves into society's seamy underside, and exposes the machinations of a corrupt power structure while maintaining a parallel discourse on the physical and cultural charms that make the country, in the end, simply irresistible. Just as fellow Brit Peter Robb does in A Death in Brazil (p. 262), Jones performs a literary autopsy on Italy while bringing it back to life. To hear him tell it, while half of all Italians are in its shops and streets, the other half are queued at the post office to apply for one of the endless list of permits the country's "clerical class" has imposed on its citizenry. Italian courts, working from a base of more law than anywhere in Europe, but without habeas corpus, tend to produce paperwork in the absence of clear convictions or acquittals, as those atop the power pyramids (including the Mafia) inevitably tamper with magistrates, juries, and whatever witnesses remain alive. Italians complain about it and suffer (insert here a mighty shrug in which the arms may resemble bat's wings) but, Jones explains, this is a country where patriotism goes first to one's city-state or district; decades of shocking factional terror following WWII were, in effect, a civil war that, like a lot of other things in Italy, never quite got finished. Enter the oligarchs, cut from the same pattern as current PM Silvio Berlusconi: owners of industries, soccer teams, newspapers or TV stations, and criminal records who arenonetheless able to vault in and out of government at will. "Here," Jones notes, "conflict of interest is a positive thing."Engaging scenes from a country trapped in a rather nice brothel.
Interesting textbook: When Someone You Love Has Alzheimers or The Psychopharmacology of Herbal Medicine
Terrible Truth about Liberals
Author: Neal Boortz
Drawing from his thirty-two-year radio career, the terrible truth of Boortz's book depicts his in-your-face brand of Libertarian politics. From questioning the true definitions of democracy and racism to challenging the entire Social Security system, he provides fresh insights into nagging social and political issues.
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