Download or read book Silvio Berlusconi s Italy written by Vittorio Vandelli and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2016-05-20 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: FINALIST at 2015 LONDON BOOK FAIR's THE WRITE STUFF prize. Can a non-fictional book be as interesting as a page-turner fictional plot?Can it be at the same time a tycoon's biography, a mafia tale, a gangster story, a political thriller, an essay on democracy, a dystopia, a sociological analysis of a nation, a scandalous sex story? If the subject-matter is Silvio Berlusconi's incredible story and Italy, the answer is yes. This book, in fact, is a unique portrait of Italy's godfather and also a detailed picture of Italian society, an attempt to allow the foreign reader to understand how it has been possible for an alleged mafia-linked business magnate and media tycoon, constantly in trouble with justice and drenched in vice, to become the most popular political leader, Prime Minister and the absolute master of the country for the last twenty years. Berlusconi is often considered the personification of corruption, of disrespect for the law, of the liaison between organized crime - politics, of immoral behaviour, typical features of that 'immoral majority' of the country. Still, there are many open questions that this book tries to answer: How come Berlusconi grabbed complete control of all Italian information and used it as a Weapon of Mass Deception that turned viewers into faithful voters? How was he able to pass laws ad-personam that made him almost untouchable by the Judicial Power and favoured his business and financial activities in an unfair game? Can we say that Berlusconi is the very symbol of a concentration of political, economic and media power in one single person never seen before, a fact that has created the greatest conflicts of interests in the Western World, or is he just another pawn in a bigger game? What is hidden under Italy's well-known surface beauty, artistry and creativity? Does Dante's underworld Inferno still exist today? Is the erosion of democracy in Berlusconi's period a trend of modern capitalism, as some 'dystopian' writers predicted?
Download or read book Berlusconi written by Alan Friedman and published by Hachette Books. This book was released on 2015-10-20 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Before there was real estate tycoon cum President-Elect Donald J. Trump, there was Silvio Berlusconi, the billionaire media mogul turned prime minster who dominated Italian life for the past twenty years. In a candid, warts-and-all portrait of the leader who played hard in office and in private life. From the bunga-bunga parties to his most secret moments with world leaders, this biography is rich in anecdotes and revelations involving Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, George W. Bush, Vladimir Putin, Mikhail Gorbachev, Tony Blair, Nicolas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel , and many others. Berlusconi's incredible rise to power started from nothing. A self-created man, he was a cruise ship crooner as a young man, became a real estate tycoon in the '70s, started the first commercial television network in history, and turned AC Milan into a world-class soccer club. And that was all before he survived the squalid swampland of Italian politics to become prime minister who has not only served the longest in Italian history, but also has generated the most controversy of arguably any world leader today.
Download or read book Silvio Berlusconi written by Paul Ginsborg and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Silvio Berlusconi, a self-made man with a taste for luxurious living, owner of a huge television empire and the politician who likened a German MEP to a Nazi concentration camp guard-small wonder that much of democratic Europe and America has responded with considerable dismay and disdain to his governance of Italy. Paul Ginsborg, contemporary Italy's foremost historian, explains here why we should take Berlusconi seriously. His new book combines historical narrative-Berlusconi's childhood in the dynamic and paternalist Milanese bourgeoisie, his strict religious schooling, a working life which has encompassed crooning, large construction projects and the creation of a commercial television empire-with careful analysis of Berlusconi's political development. While highlighting the particular italianita of Berlusconi's trajectory, Ginsborg also finds international tendencies, such as the distorted relationship between the media system and politics. Throughout, Ginsborg suggests that Berlusconi has gotten as far as he has thanks to the wide-open space left by the strategic weaknesses of modern left-wing politics.
Download or read book Silvio Berlusconi written by James L. Newell and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-18 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about one of the most remarkable European politicians of recent decades, Silvio Berlusconi, and about his contribution to the dramatic changes that have overtaken Italian politics since the early 1990s. From the vantage point of 2017, would Italian political history of the past twenty-five years look substantially different had Berlusconi not had the high-profile role in it that he did? Asking the question makes it possible to contribute to a broader debate of recent years concerning the significance of leaders in post-Cold War democratic politics. Having considered Berlusconi’s legacy in the areas of political culture, voting and party politics, public policy and the quality of Italian democracy, the book concludes by considering the international significance of the Berlusconi phenomenon in relation to the recent election of Donald Trump, with whom Berlusconi is often compared.
Download or read book Contract with America written by Newt Gingrich and published by Three Rivers Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The November 1994 midterm elections were a watershed event, making possible a Repbulican majority in Congress for the first time in forty years. Contract with America, by Newt Gingrich, the new Speaker of the House, Dick Armey, the new Majority Leader, and the House Republicans, charts a bold new political strategy for the entire country. The ten-point program, which forms the basis of this book, was announced in late September. It received the signed support of more than 300 GOP canditates. Their pledge: "If we break this contract, throw us out". Contract with America fleshes out the vision and provides the details of the program that swept the GOP to victory. Among the pressing issues addressed in this important book are: balancing the budget, stopping crime, reforming welfare, reinforcing families, enhancing fairness for seniors, strengthening national defense, cutting government regulations, promoting legal reform, considering term limits, and reducing taxes.
Download or read book Being Berlusconi written by Michael Day and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2015-07-21 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book to fully document the scandal-riddled rise and fall of Italy's Prime Minister and tabloid star—Silvio Berlusconi
Download or read book The Liberty of Servants written by Maurizio Viroli and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Italy is a country of free political institutions, yet it has become a nation of servile courtesans, with Silvio Berlusconi as their prince. Drawing upon the republican conception of liberty, this title shows that a people can be unfree even though they are not oppressed.
Download or read book Berlusconi The Diplomat written by Emidio Diodato and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2018-12-13 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyses the foreign policy of Silvio Berlusconi, Italian media tycoon and politician who served as Prime Minister of Italy in four governments. The authors examine the Italian position in the international arena and its foreign policy tradition, as well as Berlusconi’s general political stance, Berlusconi’s foreign policy strategies and the impact of those strategies in Italy. Given that Berlusconi is considered a populist leader, the volume considers his foreign policy as an instance of populist foreign policy – an understudied but increasingly relevant topic.
Download or read book Mussolini written by Nicholas Farrell and published by Independently Published. This book was released on 2018-11-22 with total page 634 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on freshly discovered material--including correspondence previously unavailable outside academia--the talented writer and journalist Nicholas Farrell has created a revelatory biography of the Italian fascist leader and dictator. How did Mussolini manage to take power and hold on to it for two decades? What inspired Churchill to call him "the Roman genius" and Pope Pius XI to say he was "sent by Providence"? And how did Mussolini successfully curtail democracy without using mass murder to stay in command? Farrell answers these questions and more, focusing particularly on Mussolini's fatal error: his alliance with Hitler, whom he despised. Anyone interested in history, politics, and World War II will encounter an intriguing and startling picture of one of the 20th century's key figures.
Download or read book The Sack of Rome written by Alexander Stille and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2007-07-31 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Award-winning author Alexander Stille has been called "one of the best English-language writers on Italy" by the New York Times Book Review, and in The Sack of Rome he sets out to answer the question: What happens when vast wealth, a virtual media monopoly, and acute shamelessness combine in one man? Many are the crimes of Silvio Berlusconi, Stille argues, and, with deft analysis, he weaves them into a single mesmerizing chronicle—an epic saga of rank criminality, cronyism, and self-dealing at the highest levels of power.
Download or read book Re inventing the Italian Right written by Stefano Fella and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-06-26 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following his third election victory in 2008, the Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was the most controversial head of government in the EU. This is a cogent examination of the Berlusconi phenomenon, exploring the success and development of the new populist right-wing coalition in Italy since the collapse of the post-war party system in the early 1990s. Carlo Ruzza and Stefano Fella provide a comprehensive discussion of the three main parties of the Italian right: Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, the xenophobic and regionalist populist Northern League and the post-fascist National Alliance. The book assesses the implications of this controversial right for the Italian democratic system and examines how the social and political peculiarities of Italy have allowed such political formations to emerge and enjoy repeated electoral success. Framed in a comparative perspective, the authors: explore the nature of the Italian right in the context of right-wing parties and populist phenomena elsewhere in other advanced democracies, drawing comparisons and providing broader explanations. locate the parties of the Italian right within the existing theoretical conceptions of right-wing and populist parties, utilising a multi-method approach, including a content analysis of party programmes. highlight the importance of political and discursive opportunities in explaining the success of the Italian right, and the agency role of a political leadership that has skilfully shaped and communicated an ideological package to exploit these opportunities. Providing an excellent insight into a key European nation, this work provides a thoughtful and stimulating contribution to the research on the Italian right, and its implications for democratic politics.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Italian Politics written by Erik Jones and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 801 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Italian Politics provides a comprehensive look at the political life of one of Europe's most exciting and turbulent democracies. Under the hegemonic influence of Christian Democracy in the early post-World War II decades, Italy went through a period of rapid growth and political transformation. In part this resulted in tumult and a crisis of governability; however, it also gave rise to innovation in the form of Eurocommunism and new forms of political accommodation. The great strength of Italy lay in its constitution; its great weakness lay in certain legacies of the past. Organized crime--popularly but not exclusively associated with the mafia--is one example. A self-contained and well entrenched 'caste' of political and economic elites is another. These weaknesses became apparent in the breakdown of political order in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This ushered in a combination of populist political mobilization and experimentation with electoral systems design, and the result has been more evolutionary than transformative. Italian politics today is different from what it was during the immediate post-World War II period, but it still shows many of the influences of the past.
Download or read book The Truth Society written by Noelle Molé Liston and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-15 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Noelle Molé Liston's The Truth Society seeks to understand how a period of Italian political spectacle, which regularly blurred fact and fiction, has shaped how people understand truth, mass-mediated information, scientific knowledge, and forms of governance. Liston scrutinizes Italy's late twentieth-century political culture, particularly the impact of the former prime minister and media mogul Silvio Berlusconi. By doing so, she examines how this truth-bending political era made science, logic, and rationality into ideas that needed saving. With the prevalence of fake news and our seeming lack of shared reality in the "post-truth" world, many people struggle to figure out where this new normal came from. Liston argues that seemingly disparate events and practices that have unfolded in Italy are historical reactions to mediatized political forms and particular, cultivated ways of knowing. Politics, then, is always sutured to how knowledge is structured, circulated, and processed. The Truth Society offers Italy as a case study for understanding the remaking of politics in an era of disinformation.
Download or read book My Two Italies written by Joseph Luzzi and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2014-07-15 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A child of Italian immigrants and scholar of Italian literature paints an intimate portrait that blends together history and the unusual to show how his 'two Italies' join and clash in unexpected ways.
Download or read book Two Friends written by Alberto Moravia and published by Other Press, LLC. This book was released on 2011-08-16 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this set of novellas, a few facts are constant. Sergio is a young intellectual, poor and proud of his new membership in the Communist Party. Maurizio is handsome, rich, successful with women, and morally ambiguous. Sergio’s young, sensual lover becomes collateral damage in the struggle between these two men. All three of these unfinished stories, found packed in a suitcase after Alberto Moravia’s death, share this narrative premise. But from there, each story unfolds in a unique way. The first patiently explores the slow unfurling of Sergio’s resentment toward Maurizio. The second reveals the calculated bargain Maurizio offers in exchange for his conversion to Sergio’s beloved Communism. And the third switches dramatically to the first person, laying bare Sergio’s conflicted soul. Anyone interested in literature will relish the opportunity to watch Moravia at work, tinkering with his story and working at it from three unique perspectives.
Download or read book Forza Italia written by Paddy Agnew and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-02-29 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When journalist Paddy Agnew and his girlfriend Dympna touched down in Rome in 1985 in search of adventure, sunshine and the soul of Italian football (well, Paddy was looking for that), they were travelling into the uncharted terrain of a country they did not know and a language they did not speak. It soon became clear that neither Italy nor Italian football would be boring. In that first week in Italy, Michel Platini and Juventus won the Intercontinental Cup, whilst just days later the PLO killed 13 people in a random shooting at Rome's Fiumicino airport. Paddy covered both stories. The coming years saw the rise of TV tycoon Silvio Berlusconi, as he became owner of AC Milan and then Prime Minister of Italy, naming his political party 'Forza Italia' after a football chant. In that same period, Argentine Diego Maradona became the uncrowned King of Naples, leading Napoli to a first ever Scudetto title in 1987, notwithstanding a hectic, Hollywood-esque lifestyle that mixed footballing genius with off-the-field excess. Forza Italia is a fascinating tale of inspired players, skilled coaches, rich tycoons, glitzy media coverage, Mafia corruption, allegations of drug taking and fan power - culminating in the 2006 World Cup victory that delighted a nation and a match-fixing scandal that shocked the world. It is also a personalised reflection on the consistent and continuing excellence of Italian football throughout a period of huge social, political and economic upheaval, offering a unique insight into a society where football has always been much more than just a game.
Download or read book First They Took Rome written by David Broder and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-07-14 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Italy’s political disaster under a microscope There is little that hasn’t gone wrong for Italy in the last three decades. Economic growth has flatlined, infrastructure has crumbled, and out-of-work youth find their futures stuck on hold. These woes have been reflected in the country’s politics, from Silvio Berlusconi’s scandals to the rise of the far right. Many commentators blame Italy’s malaise on cultural ills—pointing to the corruption of public life or a supposedly endemic backwardness. In this reading, Italy has failed to converge with the neoliberal reforms mounted by other European countries, leaving it to trail behind the rest of the world. First They Took Rome offers a different perspective: Italy isn’t failing to keep up with its international peers but farther along the same path of decline they are following. In the 1980s, Italy boasted the West’s strongest Communist Party; today, social solidarity is collapsing, working people feel ever more atomized, and democratic institutions grow increasingly hollow. Studying the rise of forces like Matteo Salvini’s Lega, this book shows how the populist right drew on a deep well of social despair, ignored by the liberal centre. Italy’s recent history is a warning from the future—the story of a collapse of public life that risks spreading across the West.
