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407. Gomorrah (Camorra optional)

By Joel Jacobsen

Roberto Saviano's Gomorrah has been celebrated as a brave book, and an eye-opening one, and as a beautifully-written one, and even (though this will never stop seeming improbable to me) as the basis for a movie.  But it's also a great book because of its universality.  It's a book about the Neapolitan Camorra, but it equally describes what happens anywhere that a "parallel power structure" comes to rival that of the government.  Wherever, that is, an alternative government by violence is instituted.  (See post 72.) Saviano might have been writing about America, or at least those portions of America judges and lawyers teach their children, as they're learning to drive, never ever to enter.  About living in any American inner city when a gang truce breaks down: In a war that is not officially declared, not recognized by governments, and not recorded by reporters, the fear also goes unspoken...continue to full post

Full post as published by Judging Crimes on November 14, 2009 (boomark / email).