A groundbreaking major bestseller in Italy, Gomorrah is Roberto Savianoa (TM)s gripping nonfiction account of the decline of Naples under the rule of the Camorra, an organized crime network with a large international reach and stakes in construction, high fashion, illicit drugs, and toxic-waste disposal.

Customer Rating:
Summary: looked like a good book
Comment: dont know about it bought it for my son and havent herd from him about it

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Customer Rating:
Summary: a great book
Comment: this is an excellent book. His literary style reminds me of the 'raw facts' style of Capote, but a prose all his own. Its a scathing read, unrelenting towards its goal of naming every last name possible involved with the Camorra. I havent really sat down and read a book from front to back since high school... about 8 years ago. This one took me by surprise. If you think organized crime is just for the movies, or all you know about it is the godfather and scarface, this will open your eyes quite a bit. highly recommended.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Naples underworld, gamorrah
Comment: Gomorrah: A Personal Journey into the Violent International Empire of Naples' Organized Crime System


good story. Scary truth.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: I smell something here
Comment: I'm a hundred pages into this overrated book and loud alarms are going off, the same sort of alarms that went off when I read "A Million Little Pieces" and "Running With Scissors." I will finish the book because it is reasonably compelling and because I love Italy, but I just don't believe everything I'm taking in. The book also seems without focus and at times the prose is heavy handed. The irony is that "Gomorrah" isn't nearly as organized as the crime network it describes. From the reviews, I expected a lot more.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: "Nothing is lost. Nothing is created. Everything is transformed."
Comment:

In Gomorrah, Saviano wades through the gates of hell, revealing the extent of criminal enterprise in southern Naples, the long tentacles of the Camorra infecting every aspect of business from the port of Naples to the interior. Inland, cement cities house men and women who work long days in fashion sweatshops, where every aspect of life is controlled by the Camorra, from the lowliest waiter to the massive factories that produce counterfeit materials. Saviano begins this undercover journey at the port, where the great engine of Chinese business ingenuity gobbles opportunity, learning, adapting, growing, replacing. For every legal shipment of goods, there are shadow shipments headed toward a greedy market, an endless network of goods and services, a fusion of fashion and greed, the profit going to the quickest and the best.

This elaborate business network is also social, entire families in service on one level or another, women as well as men. Production never ceases, the workers hunkered down in their cement hives, creating goods, every phase of production strictly monitored for maximum profit. This expose is like a vast sea roiling with activity, collateral deaths absorbed by the whole, warring factions breaking out in bursts of gunfire from AK-47s, bodies scattered like so much refuse, expeditiously swept away so business as usual can resume. From the Port and the intricate partnerships of fashion and export to the cities where product is manufactured, Saviano describes all as though his eyes a camera, intimate photographs of the power structure, the deals, the graft, the rise and fall of personalities, the purging of those who dare interfere, including powerful government officials.

In this marrying of crime to the global economy, there is a pervasive sense of inevitability, humanity bred out of a society driven by commerce, except the few who rise to fame by virtue of their power, only to disappear, replaced by others, the ebb and flow of greed and expedience. Violence goes hand in hand with life lived on such terms, a killing field quickly obliterated by goods in transport. Saviano doesn't shirk from names or detail, either: "I know how economics originate and where their smell comes from." From fashion to building, each part is integral to profit: "Cement makers create a supply system that keeps the clan in touch with contractors, linking to every possible deal, with extortion a secondary service." The implications of this book are staggering, a vision of the future stripped bare, every level of society infected by greed: "There is not a minute in which the business of living does not seem like a life sentence." This is a story that should be told. Luan Gaines/2008.

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