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Gomorrah
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Keywords: gomorrah
Number of Pages: 320
Published: 2007-10-30
List price: $25.00
ISBN-10: 0374165270
ISBN-13: 9780374165277
Book Description:
A groundbreaking major bestseller in Italy, Gomorrah is Roberto Saviano’s gripping nonfiction account of the decline of Naples under the rule of the Camorra, an organized crime network with a large international reach and stakes in construction, high fashion, illicit drugs, and toxic-waste disposal. Known by insiders as the System,” the Camorra affects cities and villages along the Neapolitan coast, and is the deciding factor in why Campania, for instance, has the highest murder rate in all of Europe and whycancer levels there have skyrocketed in recent years.
Saviano tells of huge cargoes of Chinese goods that are shipped to Naples and then quickly distributed unchecked across Europe. He investigates the Camorra’s control of thousands of Chinese factories contracted to manufacture fashion goods, legally and illegally, for distribution around the world, and relates the chilling details of how the abusive handling of toxic waste is causing devastating pollution not only for Naples but also China and Somalia. In pursuit of his subject, Saviano worked as an assistant at a Chinese textile manufacturer, a waiter at a Camorra wedding, and on a construction site. A native of the region, he recalls seeing his first murder at the age of fourteen, and how his own father, a doctor, suffered a brutal beating for trying to aid an eighteen-year-old victim who had been left for dead in the street.
Gomorrah is a bold and important work of investigative writing that holds global significance, one heroic young man’s impassioned story of a place under the rule of a murderous organization.
Saviano tells of huge cargoes of Chinese goods that are shipped to Naples and then quickly distributed unchecked across Europe. He investigates the Camorra’s control of thousands of Chinese factories contracted to manufacture fashion goods, legally and illegally, for distribution around the world, and relates the chilling details of how the abusive handling of toxic waste is causing devastating pollution not only for Naples but also China and Somalia. In pursuit of his subject, Saviano worked as an assistant at a Chinese textile manufacturer, a waiter at a Camorra wedding, and on a construction site. A native of the region, he recalls seeing his first murder at the age of fourteen, and how his own father, a doctor, suffered a brutal beating for trying to aid an eighteen-year-old victim who had been left for dead in the street.
Gomorrah is a bold and important work of investigative writing that holds global significance, one heroic young man’s impassioned story of a place under the rule of a murderous organization.
Roberto Saviano was born in Naples and studied philosophy at university. This is his first book.
An Economist Book of the Year
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
A Christian Science Monitor Best Book of the Year
Gomorrah is Roberto Saviano’s nonfiction account of the decline of Naples under the rule of the Camorra, an organized crime network with a large international reach and stakes in construction, high fashion, illicit drugs, and toxic-waste disposal. Known by insiders as the System,” the Camorra affects cities and villages along the Neapolitan coast, and is the deciding factor in why Campania, for instance, has the highest murder rate in all of Europe and whycancer levels there have skyrocketed in recent years.
Saviano tells of huge cargoes of Chinese goods that are shipped to Naples and then quickly distributed unchecked across Europe. He investigates the Camorra’s control of thousands of Chinese factories contracted to manufacture fashion goods, legally and illegally, for distribution around the world, and relates the details of how the improper handling of toxic waste is causing pollution not only for Naples but also China and Somalia. In pursuit of his subject, Saviano worked as an assistant at a Chinese textile manufacturer, a waiter at a Camorra wedding, and on a construction site. A native of the region, he recalls seeing his first murder at the age of fourteen, and how his father, a doctor, was beaten for trying to aid an eighteen-year-old victim who had been left for dead in the street.
Gomorrah, a work of investigative writing about a place under the rule of a violent organization, holds global significance.
Saviano tells of huge cargoes of Chinese goods that are shipped to Naples and then quickly distributed unchecked across Europe. He investigates the Camorra’s control of thousands of Chinese factories contracted to manufacture fashion goods, legally and illegally, for distribution around the world, and relates the details of how the improper handling of toxic waste is causing pollution not only for Naples but also China and Somalia. In pursuit of his subject, Saviano worked as an assistant at a Chinese textile manufacturer, a waiter at a Camorra wedding, and on a construction site. A native of the region, he recalls seeing his first murder at the age of fourteen, and how his father, a doctor, was beaten for trying to aid an eighteen-year-old victim who had been left for dead in the street.
Gomorrah, a work of investigative writing about a place under the rule of a violent organization, holds global significance.
"A powerful work of reportage, Gomorrah became a literary sensation when it appeared in Italy last year, selling an astonishing 600,000 copies. It started a national conversation, but also won its 28-year-old first-time author uglier accolades: death threats and a constant police escort. He now lives in hiding. The stakes are high. In Gomorrah, Saviano charts the Camorra’s involvement in the garment industry and its grip on the port of Naples, where 1.6 million tons of Chinese merchandise are unloaded a yearand another million pass through without a trace, evading taxes. In mapping out the Camorra’s control over garbage and industrial waste removal, as well as drug dealing, construction and public works fraud, Saviano considers human rights indicators (the price of an AK-47 is low in Campania), and economic ones (in the 1990s, the Mercedes sales in one Campania town were among the highest in Europe). Drawing on trial transcripts and his own reporting, he explains the internecine battles between rival factions of the Di Lauro clan for control of the region’s drug trade. Part economic analysis, part social history, part cri de coeur, this crushing testimonial is the most important book to come out of Italy in years. Like Conrad’s London, Saviano’s Naples is also one of the dark places of the earth. He tugged a loose thread in the fabric of Italian bourgeois respectability and kept pulling until nothing was left . . . The emotional truth of Saviano’s account is unassailable. I could not get this brave book out of my head. After reading Gomorrah, it becomes impossible to see Italy, and the global market, in the same way again."Rachel Donadio, The New York Times
"Think of Italythe world’s seventh-largest economyand sleek Ferraries, Armani suits, wine, food and tourism come to mind. But . . . an Italian business association reported that the largest sector of the country’s economy is organized crime, accounting for an estimated 7 percent of its gross domestic product. That’s $127 billion, more than twice the annual revenue of Microsoft. To put flesh on that unsettling X-ray, read Roberto Saviano’s astonishing Gomorrah. The book is subtitled ’A Personal Journey Into the Violent International Empire of Naples’ Organized Crime System,’ and both personal and violent it is. Saviano’s tour of his native Naples shows us the heart of what can only be called a company town for organized crime, with industrial toxins in great abundance . . . Saviano gallops straight into the maw of the inferno, using a hard-boiled style that has only begun to take root in Italian media. Naples is where he grew up, the Neapolitans are his people, and while the eyewitness accounts he brings to the pagestories of murderous barbarity and devastating debasementcould have been told by one of Dashiell Hammett’s chilly protagonists, Saviano is no cold-blooded cynic. If there is a literary model at work here, it might be the Lamentations of Jeremiah . . . Many of Saviano’s most astonishing set pieces are like dioramas from some lurid museum. There are murders, murders with torture, disposal of bodies (ingenious techniques that verge on folkways: bodies tossed into wells, followed by a grenade to bury them under tons of silt, extortion, gang wars and a teeming drug culture populated by zombie-junkies that make parts of Naples seem like scenes from ’Night of the Living Dead’ . . . Saviano first began reporting on the Camorra as an analyst for a citizen watchdog group. This puts him squarely in the activist-journalism tradition of, say, George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. Saviano openly acknowledges the influence of both left-wing and theorist Pier Paolo Pasolini and Mafia-fighting judge and martyr Giovanni Falcone. He also exhibits the passion and heroism of a young man (he was born in 1979). His work has brought him death threats and, in turn, police protectionthough not until Umberto Eco made a public appeal for the government to take action."Antony Shugaar, The Washington Post Book World
"Think of Italythe world’s seventh-largest economyand sleek Ferraries, Armani suits, wine, food and tourism come to mind. But . . . an Italian business association reported that the largest sector of the country’s economy is organized crime, accounting for an estimated 7 percent of its gross domestic product. That’s $127 billion, more than twice the annual revenue of Microsoft. To put flesh on that unsettling X-ray, read Roberto Saviano’s astonishing Gomorrah. The book is subtitled ’A Personal Journey Into the Violent International Empire of Naples’ Organized Crime System,’ and both personal and violent it is. Saviano’s tour of his native Naples shows us the heart of what can only be called a company town for organized crime, with industrial toxins in great abundance . . . Saviano gallops straight into the maw of the inferno, using a hard-boiled style that has only begun to take root in Italian media. Naples is where he grew up, the Neapolitans are his people, and while the eyewitness accounts he brings to the pagestories of murderous barbarity and devastating debasementcould have been told by one of Dashiell Hammett’s chilly protagonists, Saviano is no cold-blooded cynic. If there is a literary model at work here, it might be the Lamentations of Jeremiah . . . Many of Saviano’s most astonishing set pieces are like dioramas from some lurid museum. There are murders, murders with torture, disposal of bodies (ingenious techniques that verge on folkways: bodies tossed into wells, followed by a grenade to bury them under tons of silt, extortion, gang wars and a teeming drug culture populated by zombie-junkies that make parts of Naples seem like scenes from ’Night of the Living Dead’ . . . Saviano first began reporting on the Camorra as an analyst for a citizen watchdog group. This puts him squarely in the activist-journalism tradition of, say, George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. Saviano openly acknowledges the influence of both left-wing and theorist Pier Paolo Pasolini and Mafia-fighting judge and martyr Giovanni Falcone. He also exhibits the passion and heroism of a young man (he was born in 1979). His work has brought him death threats and, in turn, police protectionthough not until Umberto Eco made a public appeal for the government to take action."Antony Shugaar, The Washington Post Book World
"Saviano’s strongly written book deserves the remarkable attention it has been getting. Shelves of books have been published about the Mafia during the last thirty years, many of them written on the fly by journalists who drew on large chunks of court documents and made little attempt to tell a coherent, dramatic story. Saviano’s Gomorrah, by contrast, quite self-consciously (sometimes a little too self-consciously) models itself on such books as Michael’s Herr’s Dispatches and Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. Saviano gives a telling account of the ways in which organized crime in southern Italy fits into a world system of contraband goodstextiles, appliances, arms, and drugswith connections to China’s huge production of counterfeit goods, to off-the-books (but not necessarily criminal) employment in Italy, arms trafficking in Eastern Europe, construction and real estate in northern Europe, and the drug trade of South America. All of this adds up to an international underground economy that has implications far beyond its local boundaries."Alexander Stille, The New York Review of Books
"Napule (pronounced Na-poo-lay), as the natives refer to her, is where Virgil wrote the Aeneid. And no doubt it is Virgil, the voice of Reason in Dante’s Divine Comedy, after whom Roberto Saviano fashioned himself as he risked life and limb to record one of the most in-depth accounts ever written about Italy’s notorious underworld crime ring and its dealings in the international markets of high fashion, weapons, drugs, construction, and toxic waste disposal. This is a literary tour de force about The System (the name by which the Camorra refers to itself) and how those in it do their bad-guy business: ’To know you are businessmen destined to end up dead or in jail and still feel the ruthless desire to dominate powerful and unlimited economic empires.’ Beginning at the Port of Naples, which he calls ’an open wound,’ Saviano participates in the offloading of contraband from a Chinese vessel. He calculates that ’60 percent of the goods arriving in Naples escape official customs inspection, 20 percent of the bills of entry go unchecked, and fifty thousand shipments are contraband, 99 percent of them from China’ . ...
"Napule (pronounced Na-poo-lay), as the natives refer to her, is where Virgil wrote the Aeneid. And no doubt it is Virgil, the voice of Reason in Dante’s Divine Comedy, after whom Roberto Saviano fashioned himself as he risked life and limb to record one of the most in-depth accounts ever written about Italy’s notorious underworld crime ring and its dealings in the international markets of high fashion, weapons, drugs, construction, and toxic waste disposal. This is a literary tour de force about The System (the name by which the Camorra refers to itself) and how those in it do their bad-guy business: ’To know you are businessmen destined to end up dead or in jail and still feel the ruthless desire to dominate powerful and unlimited economic empires.’ Beginning at the Port of Naples, which he calls ’an open wound,’ Saviano participates in the offloading of contraband from a Chinese vessel. He calculates that ’60 percent of the goods arriving in Naples escape official customs inspection, 20 percent of the bills of entry go unchecked, and fifty thousand shipments are contraband, 99 percent of them from China’ . ...
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