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Rating: 
Summary: Political snapshots
Review: This book is a collection of life stories of Sicilians as told to Danilo Dolci. Dolci, a Northern Italian, arrived in Sicily in 1952. The poverty that he confronted there every day was overwhelming, and he was determined to help the local people improve their lives through political organization and education. As he helped build unions and charity institutions, Dolci talked to the people he was working with. He asked them about their backgrounds, how they came to be poor or rich, what their values were, and their dreams. The stories are organized into groups according to Dolci's view of their role in society: the indigenous, the parasites, vicious circles, plagues, waste, those who endure, and those who resist (exploitation by the capitalists). Many of the stories are simply amazing: the orphan who is trained to be a pickpocket and then grows to be a respectable trained worker, the man who gets his revenge on women by seducing them and purposefully infecting them with syphilis, the healer who specializes in extracting intestinal parasites and other worms. The overall message of the book seems to be how miserable society can become when there is a complete lack of trust and honesty. Perhaps this was Dolci's goal- -to get people to begin to build a community for themselves by starting with a little trust. The stories of this book will help you understand just how far behind Southern Italy was from Northern Italy and the rest of Europe only a generation or two ago, and perhaps the reasons behind the differences, as well.
Rating:
Summary: Political snapshots
Review: This book is a collection of life stories of Sicilians as told to Danilo Dolci. Dolci, a Northern Italian, arrived in Sicily in 1952. The poverty that he confronted there every day was overwhelming, and he was determined to help the local people improve their lives through political organization and education. As he helped build unions and charity institutions, Dolci talked to the people he was working with. He asked them about their backgrounds, how they came to be poor or rich, what their values were, and their dreams. The stories are organized into groups according to Dolci's view of their role in society: the indigenous, the parasites, vicious circles, plagues, waste, those who endure, and those who resist (exploitation by the capitalists). Many of the stories are simply amazing: the orphan who is trained to be a pickpocket and then grows to be a respectable trained worker, the man who gets his revenge on women by seducing them and purposefully infecting them with syphilis, the healer who specializes in extracting intestinal parasites and other worms. The overall message of the book seems to be how miserable society can become when there is a complete lack of trust and honesty. Perhaps this was Dolci's goal- -to get people to begin to build a community for themselves by starting with a little trust. The stories of this book will help you understand just how far behind Southern Italy was from Northern Italy and the rest of Europe only a generation or two ago, and perhaps the reasons behind the differences, as well.
Rating: 
Summary: A GOOD BOOK WITH A POOR TRANSLATION
Review: This is a pleasant novel by Danilo Dolci, but the English in it is of awkward quality and doesn't do it justice. Like most things Vitiello touches, it sounds convoluted, dull and flat. Perhaps, he's a good scholar, but his own poetry in English is as dull, flat and convoluted as all of his translations. The other translator would do well to stay away from him as he gives her work a bad name. He simply doesn't understand English and its idioms well enough to do a good job of translation. A reader from Paterson Community College
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