The White War: Life And Death on the Italian Front , 1915-1919

Just received this through the mail.
Looks interesting, let's hope it's more reader-friendly than the ones we're "obliged" to read in university about the First World War (Furet...).


The White War: Life And Death on the Italian Front , 1915-1919
By Mark Thompson



"The Western Front dominates our memories of the First World War. Yet a million and half men died in North East Italy in a war that need never have happened, when Italy declared war on the Habsburg Empire in May 1915. Led by General Luigi Cadorna, the most ruthless of all the Great War commanders, waves of Italian conscripts were sent charging up the limestone hills north of Trieste to be massacred by troops fighting to save their homelands. This is a great, tragic military history of a war that gave birth to fascism. Mussolini fought in these trenches, but so did many of the greatest modernist writers in Italian and German - Ungaretti, Gadda, Musil, Hemingway. It is through these accounts that Mark Thompson, with great skill and empathy, brings to life this forgotten conflict."

What I'm reading at the moment

I'm almost finishing this one. The book counts the story of the Cosa Nostra, the sicilian mafia, since it's beggining in the 19th century in the Palermo lemon groves, through the first world war and the rising of the Fascism in Italy till the present day, with a few pages on the ramifications of the organisation in the USA, the birth of it with the great sicilian influx and some early reports of the mafia related crimes in the States and early mafiosos.
It's really interesting to see how the mafia got through a lot of problems that easily could have meant the end of it, but, somehow, and through various schemes, they've survived, grow bigger and spread through the whole island and to the other side of the Atlantic. A lot of trials, a lot of evidence, all came to light in all these years, yet, not until the 1980's, with the beggining of the pentitos evidence testemonies and the work of Judge Falcone, the mafia never got hit really big.
Yet, it was not destroyed, and there's not and end in sight either.


I'm still in the beggining of these one, so can't say much about it besides it looks really interesting and well documented.
The book is about the gulags, the USSR forced labour camps that the soviet regime used throughout the whole first half of the last century. It documents the living of the prisioners, the conditions, the killings, and the great importance that the production in the camps had in the Soviet economy and war effort.
I'm still a bit past the first chapter, so can't say much about it yet...