Product Description

This is a dangerous, politically explosive international literary sensation. Roberto Saviano's groundbreaking and utterly compelling book is a major international bestseller, and has to date sold 650,000 copies in Italy alone. Since publishing his searing expose of their criminal activities, the author has received so many death threats from the Camorra that he has been assigned police protection. Known by insiders as 'the System', the Camorra, an organized crime network with a global reach and large stakes in construction, high fashion, illicit drugs and toxic-waste disposal, exerts a malign grip on cities and villages along the Neapolitan coast is the deciding factor in why Campania has the highest murder rate in all of Europe and why cancer levels there have skyrocketed in recent years.In pursuit of his subject, Saviano worked as an assistant at a Chinese textile manufacturer and on a construction site, both controlled by 'the System', and as a waiter at a Camorra wedding. Born in Naples, 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 help an eighteen-year-old victim, left for dead in the street."Gomorrah" is both a bold and engrossing piece of investigative writing and one heroic young man's impassioned story of a place under the rule of a murderous organization.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1083158 in Books
• Published on: 2007-11-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 424 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Saviano has created a perfectly realized, morally compelling journey through the brutal world of contemporary Italian mob life in this ceaselessly violent tale of the Camorra, a network of thugs, exploiters and killers who run Naples and the surrounding countryside. Armed with a police band radio, Saviano visits one crime scene after another, recording the final words and circumstances of the dying and dead. The murders described are savage, cruel and senseless: The head... hadn't been cut off with a hatchet, a clean blow, but with a metal grinder: the kind of circular saw welders use to polish soldering. The worst possible tool, and thus the most obvious choice. Jewiss's translation of Saviano's intense prose flows beautifully from the pestilence and degradation of everyday life in the teeming Neapolitan slums to the futile efforts of the police to control the rich, organic chaos that is the only way the Camorra know how to live. A stunning achievement, this is a must-read for anyone interested in the state of contemporary Europe. (Nov.)
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From AudioFile
GOMORRAH does for the Italian Mafia what THE GODFATHER and THE SOPRANOS did for American organized crime. But GOMORRAH is real. Investigative reporter Roberto Saviano, a lifelong native of Naples, reveals the criminal underbelly of his city in frightening detail. Michael Kramer narrates with a steady technique. His calm approach to the material, much like that of an unflappable news anchor, magnifies the horror of the incidents being related. Whether Kramer is recounting the tamer portions about the fake-fashion underworld or relating the more graphic sections that deal with torture and murder, he is our anchor. What's more surprising is that the book was published at all, since Saviano names names. No wonder he's been under police protection. M.S. © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

From Booklist
*Starred Review* Saviano, an investigative journalist, uses the port city of Naples as an entry point into the nefarious dealings of the Italian crime network, the Camorra, which has a stranglehold on the global economy through its control of the international clothing market, art collecting, drug dealing, construction trades, and toxic waste disposal. Naples is the epicenter for the criminal cartel since, as Saviano says, "Everything that exists passes through here." At a time when Chinese exports of pet food and seafood have become suspect, Saviano provides a revealing examination of the ways in which black-market profit mongering and lack of regulations ruin workers' lives and endanger us all. This investigation, published in Italy in 2006, became a best-seller and won the Viareggio Literary Prize. It's a stunner of a book, as accessible to American audiences, through its searing style and timely investigation, as it is to Italians. Perhaps most importantly, Saviano's accusations are utterly convincing because of his undercover investigations: in the best Upton Sinclair tradition, he worked at a Chinese textile factory in Naples, at a construction site, even as a waiter at a Camorra family wedding. Throughout, he relies on the significant detail to carry his outrage: scores of frozen Chinese bodies spilling out onto a dock; the sight of a Chinese factory worker at the bottom of a well, beaten and stabbed to death after refusing sex with her boss. Through his firsthand observation and interviews, he lays bare the abuses fed by this well-oiled and well-hidden criminal system. Devastating. Fletcher, Connie

Customer Reviews

Sad truth about Italy
Those of us who love Italy as a destination of beauty and art tend not to want to think about how things work day to day. This sad and shocking book is a brave account of behind-the-scenes corruption that originates in the south but affects all parts of the country. The translation can be a little stilted, but should not be enough to put anyone off reading Saviano's excellent book.

Suffers a Bit in Translation
This is a very good book that sends a shocking message about organized crime in Italy, Europe, the West and the rest of the world, for that is how far the tentacles of such a crime "System" reach. It is so shocking that one struggles with disbelief as one reads the text. The pun in the title may escape some readers: Gomorrah (Gamorra in Italian) is the Camorra organized crime system of Naples and surrounding region (interestring that the name seems to be derived from the Spanish word meaning, fight - the Spaniards were long in southern Italy).

I haven't read the original, yet, but I will. This translation is adequate and in spots gripping; it conveys the message if not always the meaning of the original. Translation, however, is always problematic. Here's one example to illustrate the problem. The Italian word, "sequestrare", has in context either the primary or secondary meaning of the English, "sequester". The meaning is English is best illustrated, and almost exclusively used, as in this sentence: "The jury was sequestered for three days." But the secondary meaning in English is not often seen: "The property was squestered" is normal Italian, but the English would read, "The property was seized" or even, "confiscated", notwithstanding the original might not be "confiscato" but "sequestrato".

The translation leaves the impression the original is choppy and somewhat disjointed. Who knows, maybe it is; Italian prose doesn't often achieve the clarity and conciseness that can English. But, nonetheless, it conveys the horrors of Gamorrah, especially at the end where the author closes his story with a tale of toxic waste that is truly horriifying and reflective of the coming end: fire.