It's already day five! Well - that went fast. Today I'm reading a biography of Gaetano Salvemini, an Italian socialist who was central to anti-fascist politics in the U.S. starting when he arrived from Europe in 1927. So far this year, I've seen a lot about Salvemini: I've read his first book on Italian fascism, and have come across stories about him in other books on Italian Anti-fascism as well as newspapers from the 1920s, but I still haven't read this biography, which is pretty fascinating. He was one of the early socialist intellectuals in Italy, and was popular with Gramsci and other left socialists in the 1910s prior to the founding of the Italian Communist Party after the Bolshevik Revolution. He's relevant to multiple chapters of my current book project, because of his role both in agitation against fascism in the 1920s-1930s and his efforts in the post-war era when he returned to Italy.
On day four, I listened to more of the audiobook of the Tusa's Nuremberg trials book, read a little bit of Biddiscombe's book on DeNazification, and finished up reading relevant chapters on the relationship between the United States and Charles De Gaulle, including an article by Ronald Steel about Walter Lippman's promotion of De Gaulle's ideas through his newspaper column in the early 40s.
On day three, I read the first half of the De Gaulle book, and listened to the Tusas on Nuremberg, but I was too distracted by the ongoing disastrous events in Israel and Palestine and spent too much time reading news.
Each day, I started out with about 40 -50 pages in Kim Stanely Robinson's Ministry for the Future, so I'm now just a little over 100 pages from finishing that tome. It continues to be good, though some of the chapters with long lists of things are a little bit of a slog. In those wee hours of the night when I can't sleep, I've been reading Peter May's Lockdown, which I'd bought as a cheap ebook when it became a brief sensation for presciently setting a mystery in quarantined London during a bird flu pandemic. The pandemic setting is fairly good, but the mystery itself is absurd. Not up to the level of May's Lewis novels at all, but at least I'm close to done with it.
Overall, I'd say that I've read a couple hundred pages over the last few days and listened to four hours of the audiobook. I'm hoping to read more over the weekend.
For today's listening to go with the reading, here's some traditional Pizzica music from Southern Italy, the region where Salvemini grew up, and which he (and his biographer) see as a crucial element in his character and political views. It was unusual for someone to become a professor in Florence with with what Killinger describes as Salvemini's "peasant mannerisms" and "rough hewn ways."
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