The New York Review of Books

The Last Slaves of Mauritania, NY Review of Books, Nov 23, 2017

You can both see the desert and feel its presence in Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania, which goes months at a time without rain. Although it is a city of one million people, rivulets of sand collect along the main paved thoroughfares of the city center, in front of a handful of government buildings and…

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Dancing to Nowhere, review of “La Grande Bellezza,” New York Review of Books blog, Jan. 9, 2014

If the character Marcello in Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita—played unforgettably by Marcello Mastroianni—had spent another four decades flitting about the high life of Rome he might have turned into someone like Jep Gambardella, the protagonist of Italian film director Paolo Sorrentino’s La Grande Bellezza (The Great Beauty). A self-conscious twenty-first century version of the Fellini classic, La Grande…

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The Strange Victory of Padre Pio

Padre Pio: Miracles and Politics in a Secular Age by Sergio Luzzatto, translated from the Italian by Frederika Randall Picador, 371 pp., $22.00 (paper) 1. In the summer of 1960, the Holy Office of the Vatican dispatched an apostolic visitor to investigate Padre Pio, a friar of the Capuchin order who had apparently borne the…

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The Corrupt Reign of Emperor Silvio

Papi: Uno Scandalo Politico (Papi: A Political Scandal)  by Peter Gomez, Marco Lillo, and Marco Travaglio Milan: Chiarelettere, 331 pp., P15.00 (paper) Il Regalo di Berlusconi (The Gift of Berlusconi)  by Peter Gomez and Antonella Mascali Milan: Chiarelettere, 339 pp., P15.00 (paper) Gradisca, Presidente: Tutta la verità della escort più famosa al mondo (At Your…

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