Report from Palermo - Softcover

Dolci, Danilo

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0670002887 ISBN 13: 9780670002887

Publisher: Penguin Books, 1970

Synopsis

Not only a literary but also a sociological masterpiece. It is a cross-section of misery that shocks and shames and yet, curiously, exhilarates. For one after another of these exploited and downtrodden victims, a fire glows. They are waiting. From the introduction by Aldous Huxley: Palermo is a city of more than half a million inhabitants, of whom well over a hundred thousand live in conditions of what can only be described as Asiatic poverty...Dolci has set forth the statistics of this giant misery and has recorded in their own words how the inhabitants of the city's lower depths pass their distorted lives, what they do and think and feel. The book is absorbingly interesting and at the same time profoundly depressing, one might almost say, on a cosmic scale. For Palermo, of course, is in no way unique. All over the world there are hundreds of cities, thousands and tens of thousands of small towns and villages, where present conditions are at least as bad and where the future looks darker, the prospects for improvement seem incomparable worse...Sicily, after all, is a part of Italy, and Italy is a highly civilized country...Some day something will undoubtedly be done about those grisly slums and their chronically unemployed inhabitants. Meanwhile Dolci is doing what little a man of knowledge and good will..can do to mitigate the present wretchedness and to find out, systematically and scientifically, what needs to be done in the future and how that which needs to be done can be accomplished.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 1970
• ISBN 10: 0670002887
• ISBN 13: 9780670002887
• Binding: Paperback