Roberto Saviano

Its hard to see how this brave, lucid and heroic book wouldnt' get 5 stars from any reviewer. Even better, the movie version, whilst having only tenuous links with the book, is brilliant in its own right. Saviano is a journalist of an unusual type these days - prepared to get down and dirty (in this case as a manual labourer) rather than rely on press releases, gossip and twitter. He has a no nonsense style; he points the finger, backs it up with facts, and adds local colour for show more illumination. He can surely never live in Napoli again and in many ways this is his triumph. Should be compulsory reading not just for its exposure of of the Camorra but more disturbingly for the way it has blended into legal capitalism. In many ways, Saviano argues, capitalism cannot exist without the Camorra and its ilk. Soberingly he is probably right show less

I have always categorized the italian mob in my head as something that doesn't really exist any more and only lives on in movies and television. Boy was I wrong! In this wonderful non-fiction book Roberto Saviano details the many tentacles of the Cammorah, the italian mafia that is centered in the southern part of Italy. Saviano describes the manner in which the crime syndicates have worked their way into many sectors of legitimate enterprise, such as construction, waste management and the show more garment industry. Because Saviano, who is a native of the area he is writing about, has a philosophy degree in addition to his career as a journalist, he writes not only about the facts of the criminal gangs, but also what living in such a society does to the souls of the people who live there. I found this book to be a sobering antidote to violence portrayed as glamorous, as it is in so many facets of popular culture. show less

This is a study of organized crime in southern Italy, a.k.a. the Camorra, which is much bigger than the Sicilian Mafia and also somewhat less organized. And it does contain facts about the Camorra; but if you want to be informed in any methodical way—like about how they got to where they are now, or whether recent prosecutions of them have made a difference, or who the author is (other than a guy who grew up in their territory) or how he managed to investigate so much of this up show more close—you'll have to look elsewhere. It's not that kind of book.

Saviano isn't mainly trying to inform you, and he's not trying to entertain you (although in the few sections where he pauses for a while to give a ground-level view of one person's story, it's very involving; those are basically the parts that made it into the movie, which is also good). He's trying to overwhelm you. After an opening chapter that's in a more familiar style of first-person reportage and keeps the story at an easily understandable level, the book quickly escalates, rushing through one story after another or within another, and alternating between banal scams, long lists of names, and insane atrocities, so you never know what to expect; the overall impression is that it doesn't really matter where he starts, this thing is just too big and chaotic to describe rationally.

The one constant is Saviano's anger, as it gradually becomes clear how much of a personal thing this is for him: he hates these people, not just for terrorizing and exploiting everyone in his home region of Campania, but for contributing to a general acceptance of corruption throughout Italy. One guy claims that the illegal waste management industry, which basically just throws toxic waste all over Campania, was responsible for boosting Italy's economy enough to get into the European Union, so everyone should be grateful; of course it happens to be that guy's own industry, but the implication is that lots of people think that way and they're not all in the Camorra. (The rest of the world isn't exempt, as the book often points out how legitimate companies and governments elsewhere have relied on the Camorra's business ventures.) When Saviano appears in the story, he doesn't depict himself as an intrepid reporter, just someone who's so dazed and revulsed by everything he sees that he has no idea what to do but keep writing—except when at one point he decides to pee in a mob boss's abandoned villa.

But he doesn't think there's anything uniquely evil about the clans; this is just what happens when legitimate systems aren't working well and people get used to the idea that ethics will stop you from getting anywhere. A recurring theme of the book is that the Camorra doesn't have a code or a philosophy or a strategy (or really even a hierarchy, in the sense of any stable structure; bosses don't last long, and the aspiring bosses don't expect to). It's just a lot of people who want more stuff and don't care about other people. It's a disease of capitalism—not that something similar can’t arise within other systems, but this is what we're working with.

The prose style isn't really my cup of tea (that could be partly the translation, but also Saviano rarely uses one simile when five would do) and reading it is a very uneven and exhausting experience. But if you don't mind being a little bored at some times and horrified at other times, and you want to know more about parts of Italian culture that aren't well known in the US—not just the criminal parts, but what it can be like for people simply trying to get by—it's quite a thing. show less

When Gomorrah was firt published, it was risky investigative journalism at its finest; Saviano revealed to Italians and to the wider world the nature and extent of the Comorra's domination of Naples, Campania and beyond.

Even the best journalism loses its immediacy over time, but after 10 years and from half a world away, Gomorrah is still a riveting read. Saviano recounts a catalogue of vicious crimes and ongoing feuds that turned Campania into a bloodbath, pretty much the murder capital of show more the world. As well as their drug and extortion actvities, Saviano explains how the bosses extended their tentacles into the more legitimate business world, coming to dominate the garment and construction industries, waste management and others. Their ruthlessness enables them to spread beyond Italy to Eastern Europe, China and the UK.

The book starts off fairly matter-of-fact, but you gradually sense the author's mounting rage against the system,spilling out in a chapter where he points his finger and sets his face against the clans. They took him seriously - he's needed government protection since publication - and we should too. show less