Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Naples '44: A World War II Diary of Occupied Italy

Naples '44: A World War II Diary of Occupied Italy

Lewis, Norman
Kershaw, Alex

Paperback

Military BiographiesTravel WritingWorld War II

Publisher Price: $19.99

ISBN10: 0306835258
ISBN13: 9780306835254
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: Aug 6 2024
Pages: 192
Weight: 0.39
Height: 0.56 Width: 5.56 Depth: 8.23
Language: English
Re-released eighty years after liberation with a new foreword from Alex Kershaw, New York Times bestselling author of The Longest Winter and Resident Historian of the WWII Memorial.

From the author Graham Greene called one of our best writers, not of any particular decade but of our century, comes a masterpiece about a war-ravaged city under occupation

As a young intelligence officer stationed in Naples following its liberation from Nazi forces, Norman Lewis recorded the lives of a proud and vibrant people forced to survive on prostitution, thievery, and a desperate belief in miracles and cures. The most popular of Lewis's twenty-seven books, Naples '44 is a landmark poetic study of the agony of wartime occupation and its ability to bring out the worst, and often the best, in human nature. In prose both heartrending and comic, Lewis describes an era of disillusionment, escapism, and hysteria in which the Allied occupiers mete out justice unfairly and fail to provide basic necessities to the populace while Neapolitan citizens accuse each other of being Nazi spies, women offer their bodies to the same Allied soldiers whose supplies they steal for sale on the black market, and angry young men organize militias to oppose temporary foreign rule. Yet over the chaotic din, Lewis sings intimately of the essential dignity of the Neapolitan people, whose traditions of civility, courage, and generosity of spirit shine through daily. This essential World War II book is as timely a read as ever.

Norman Lewis is one of the greatest twentieth-century British writers and Naples '44 is his masterpiece. A lyrical, ironic, and detached account of a tempestuous, byzantine, and opaque city in the aftermath of war. -- Will Self

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