Rebels & mafiosi : death in a Sicilian landscape /

Using archives in Rome and Palermo, parliamentary inquests, police reports, and trial documents, Fentress refutes some of the legends and myths about the mafia, an organization first identified in a 1865 report. Reconstructing its formative period, the author links the appearance of the "dangerous" classes during the 19th century revolutions against Bourbon control to the evolution of mafia clientele covertly allied to politically influential classes. Fentress analyzes the post-Italian unification disjuncture between Sicily and Piedmont, which failed to see the mafia ("soldiers of the permanent revolution") as not only a submerged power structure but an alternative power provoked into existence by failed government reforms and repressions. Profiles of Salvatore Marina and Paolo Palmieri illustrate the developing network of personal relationships through the cosche. An analysis of mafia centers in Monreale and Misilmeri, where strong revolutionary traditions existed before 1860, supports Fentress' theses. Vividly written and insightful about Sicilian social and political history of the 19th century. Up-to-date bibliography and adequate illustrations. Recommended for university and public collections at all levels. M. S. Miller; emeritus, University of Illinois at Chicago

Thorough if somewhat dry, this scholarly history traces the rise of the Mafia in its ancestral homeland. Freelance writer Fentress locates the roots of the Mafia in the 19th-century rebellions that occurred when the Sicily attempted to break free from Naples's control. He shows that the local officials relied on "an extensive network of spies and informers" to exert control over an unruly population. Nor did this situation change after Italy unified in the 1860s. With the help of police archives, trial records and contemporary accounts, the pace picks up in the book's livelier second half. Fentress describes how these spies and informers, along with some of the revolutionaries who fought Italy's national liberation movement, later became the soldiers of the Mafia. "Revolution creates its own rules," the author writes, and in the 19th century, a no-man's land developed in Sicily, full of relations that were "somewhere between the illegal and the illicit." In a poor society with a tradition for violence, the Mafia was able to prosper despite sporadic attempts to eradicate it. Indeed, the government's crackdowns only reinforced the already popular notion that the Mafia is all-powerful. After refuting the idea that the Mafia has always been intertwined with the "Sicilian soul," Fentress persuasively argues that without effective governance and improved economic conditions, the island is unlikely to rid itself of what he calls the "soldiers of the permanent revolution." B&w photos. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Nineteenth-century Sicily was defined by two successive concepts: revolution and Mafia. Social historian Fentress (Social Memory) shows how the former led to the creation of the latter. He describes in detail several inconclusive attempts at revolution, mostly in the name of Sicilian independence from Naples. He then traces how, once the fervor died down, the rebel cells drifted instead into crime. They quickly came to specialize in the traditional protection rackets associated with the Mafia. The word Mafia itself was unknown before the 1860s, but both word and concept were omnipresent by 1900. Fentress tells his story well, particularly in his vivid portraits of the Palermo revolutionaries, who raised the tricolor over and over again for decades. How these zealous men who fought for liberty ended up squabbling over turf and murdering their neighbors in family feuds is a sad yet interesting tale. Recommended for academic libraries. [Fentress's Blood and Honor: From the Mafia's Sicilian Roots to Its Domination of American Crime was recently published by Birch Lane Press.--Ed.]--Robert Persing, Univ. of Pennsylvania Lib., Philadelphia (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

A thoroughly researched history of the origins of the Mafia in Sicily. Journalist and translator Fentress (Eco's The Search for the Perfect Language, 1995) reveals that the first printed occurrences of the word "mafia" date from the 1860s in the Palermo region. Derived from Palermitan slang for "flashy," it soon grew to mean the "kingdom within a kingdom," the "network of submerged power," the criminal underworld. Fentress's thesis is that "the story of the mafia cannot be understood except against the background of the revolution," so he proceeds in his extremely detailed text to examine the uprisings in Sicily in 1820, 1848, 1860, and 1866--the latter "transforming itself into the mafia." After an initial chapter dealing with pre-Mafia Sicily (beginning with the transfer of the island from Spain to Naples in 1743) and with a failed uprising in 1820, Fentress deals with each major revolutionary period in a separate chapter. The 1848 revolt succeeded briefly, only to be put down six months later by the Neapolitans. The 1860 revolution featured the derring-do of Garibaldi, and this chapter therefore contains some of Fentress's most engaging narrative. In June 1860, after a "stunning military victory" by Garibaldi's vastly outnumbered followers, the Neapolitans capitulated and Garibaldi assumed his stature as a Sicilian hero--if not a deity. Slipping into the interstice separating order from chaos was the criminal class known by all in the 1860s as the Mafia. (Fentress dismisses as "nonsense" the numerous folk stories about the Mafia's medieval origins.) In an interesting section pointing out the parallels between criminals and politicians, Fentress observes that their talents "are broadly similar." He also notes that the Mafia's rise to power can be attributed partially to the Sicilian trust of "brigands and criminals . . . [rather] than the authorities." Fentress ends his history with the chilling observation that the "mafia are the soldiers of the permanent revolution" (i.e., of the continuing "refusal to recognize . . . the legitimacy of authority"). Sometimes exciting, sometimes tedious, always supported by a sturdy foundation of fact and tireless archival research. (3 maps, 18 plates) Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.