Alexander Stille (born January 1, 1957, in New York City) [1] is an American author and journalist.
Alexander Stille (born January 1, 1957, in New York City) [1] is an American author and journalist.
He is the son of Elizabeth and Michael U. Stille. [2] Michael was a Russian-born journalist who was the longtime American correspondent for and later chief editor of Milan's Corriere della Sera newspaper. [3] Alexander graduated from Yale and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
Stille has written several books and numerous articles about Italy's history, culture, and politics, and the legacy of the Mafia. His writing has appeared in publications including the New York Times , La Repubblica , The New Yorker , The New York Review of Books , The New York Times Magazine , the Atlantic Monthly , The New Republic , The Correspondent , U.S. News & World Report , The Boston Globe , and the Toronto Globe and Mail . [4]
Stille's first book, Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families Under Fascism, won the Los Angeles Times book award and was chosen by the Times Literary Supplement as one of the best books of 1992. In it, Stille recounts the histories of several Italian families to explore the "paradoxical quality of Jewish life in fascist Italy—a highly tolerant country that suddenly embraced anti-Semitism, the chief ally of Nazi Germany, which had staunchly refused to cooperate with the deportation of Jews." [5] He ultimately shows how the "experience of Italian Jews" during fascist rule entailed "a strange mixture of benevolence and betrayal, persecution and rescue" that distinguished it from most of the rest of Europe. [5] Herbert Mitgang wrote in the New York Times, "The result ... is an achievement that deserves to stand next to the most insightful fiction about life and death under Fascism." [6]
In 1995, Stille published an examination of more recent Italian history: Excellent Cadavers: The Mafia and the Death of the First Italian Republic , an investigation into the Sicilian Mafia in the latter half of the 20th century. It focuses on the events leading up to the major crackdown against the criminal organization in the 1990s following the bloodthirsty reign of Salvatore Riina and was dedicated in part to the memory of anti-mafia judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino. Calling Stille "a writer to watch", Richard Bernstein described Excellent Cadavers in the New York Times as an "absorbing, detailed history" that was "meticulously researched". [7] The events outlined in the book were turned into two movies of the same name: a fictionalized 1999 HBO Pictures account, starring Chazz Palminteri as Falcone, [8] and a 2005 documentary directed by Marco Turco. [9]
In The Future of the Past (2002), Stille considers how people relate to history in a constantly evolving world. "Trying to show the double-edged nature of technological change in a series of different contexts and from a number of odd angles", he appraised subjects as varied as historical monuments in Egypt, China, and Italy, environmental preservation efforts in India and Madagascar, and repositories of collective knowledge, including the Vatican Library and the U.S. National Archives. [10] Stille "chose to avoid arguing a particular thesis". [10] In a review, Michiko Kakutani called the book "fascinating but helter-skelter," a "book in which the parts are much more interesting than the whole". [11]
Stille revisited his first two books' focus on Italy in The Sack of Rome: How a Beautiful European Country with a Fabled History and a Storied Culture Was Taken Over by a Man Named Silvio Berlusconi (2006). In a review of the book's examination of Berlusconi's transformation from a real estate and media mogul into Italy's prime minister, Publishers Weekly praised Stille for having "exquisitely analyzed not only contemporary Italian culture but [also] the ominous rise of an international political culture in which figures such as Berlusconi can flourish". [12] Interest in the book was rekindled during and after the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign; for example, MSNBC's Chris Hayes said he had read it "a few days after Trump was elected" because Stille's profile of Berlusconi suggested "the closest modern analogue" to Trump's ascendancy he could think of. [13] Stille himself considered the comparison in a 2016 essay for The Intercept , noting that "both [Trump and Berlusconi] are billionaires who made their initial fortunes in real estate, whose wealth and playboy lifestyles turned them into celebrities" with "improbable inter-class appeal", while also exploring how "the almost total deregulation of broadcast media" in Italy and the U.S. helped create conditions that each of them could use to their political advantage. [14]
In The Force of Things: A Marriage in War and Peace (2013), a work supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship [15] that also won the 2014 Blake-Dodd Prize for Nonfiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, [16] Stille turned his investigative reporting skills to his family and produced a book that is part memoir, part dual biography of his parents—his journalist father, "a refugee of two countries" who had fled both the Russian Revolution and Italian fascism, and his mother with her "midwestern, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant" background. [17] In the New York Times, Kakutani wrote that Stille's portrayal of his parents' "distressing tale of marital woe becomes a fascinating psychological study of two people with complicated family pasts, trying to forge identities of their own—two people with utterly different views and experiences of history." [2]
In The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune (2023), Stille examines the turbulent history of a radical psychotherapy group, the Sullivan Institute for Research in Psychoanalysis, whose "founders wanted to start a revolution ... grounded in ideals of creative expression, sexual liberation, and freedom from societal norms" and by the 1960s had become "an urban commune of hundreds of people [on Manhattan's Upper West Side], with patients living with other patients, leading creative, polyamorous lives." [18] Stille chronicles how this idealistic endeavor quickly "devolved from a radical communal experiment into an insular cult, with therapists controlling virtually every aspect of their patients' lives, from where they lived to how often they saw their children." [18] Publishers Weekly called The Sullivanians "an intimate and engrossing look at the ... group that emerged in 1950s New York City and Amagansett, Long Island" and eventually drew in "celebrity followers [that] included novelists Richard Elman and Richard Price, singer Judy Collins, and art critic Clement Greenberg, who recruited painters Jackson Pollock and [Jules] Olitski." Praising Stille's use of "candid interviews with ex-members and their children", the review concludes that the work is a "doggedly researched and thoroughly compassionate ... page-turning exposé" of the community's rise and fall. [19]
Stille is the San Paolo Professor of International Journalism at the Columbia School of Journalism. [4]
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Giovanni Falcone was an Italian judge and prosecuting magistrate. From his office in the Palace of Justice in Palermo, Sicily, he spent most of his professional life trying to overthrow the power of the Sicilian Mafia. After a long and distinguished career, culminating in the Maxi Trial in 1986–1987, on 23 May 1992, Falcone was assassinated by the Corleonesi Mafia in the Capaci bombing, on the A29 motorway near the town of Capaci.
Propaganda Due was a Masonic lodge, founded in 1877, within the tradition of Continental Freemasonry and under the authority of Grand Orient of Italy. Its Masonic charter was withdrawn in 1976, and it was transformed by Worshipful Master Licio Gelli into an international, illegal, clandestine, anti-communist, anti-Soviet, anti-Marxist, and radical right criminal organization and secret society operating in contravention of Article 18 of the Constitution of Italy that banned all such secret associations. Licio Gelli continued to operate the unaffiliated lodge from 1976 to 1984. P2 was implicated in numerous Italian crimes and mysteries, including the collapse of the Holy See-affiliated Banco Ambrosiano, the contract killings of journalist Carmine Pecorelli and mobbed-up bank president Roberto Calvi, and political corruption cases within the nationwide Tangentopoli bribery scandal. P2 came to light through the investigations into the collapse of Michele Sindona's financial empire.
Paolo Emanuele Borsellino was an Italian judge and prosecuting magistrate. From his office in the Palace of Justice in Palermo, Sicily, he spent most of his professional life trying to overthrow the power of the Sicilian Mafia. After a long and distinguished career, culminating in the Maxi Trial in 1986–1987, on 19 July 1992, Borsellino was killed by a car bomb in Via D'Amelio, near his mother's house in Palermo.
Enzo Biagi was an Italian journalist, writer and former partisan.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG) is an American book publishing company, founded in 1946 by Roger Williams Straus Jr. and John C. Farrar. FSG is known for publishing literary books, and its authors have won numerous awards, including Pulitzer Prizes, National Book Awards, and Nobel Prizes. As of 2016 the publisher is a division of Macmillan, whose parent company is the German publishing conglomerate Holtzbrinck Publishing Group.
Stefano Bontade, born Stefano Bontate, was a powerful member of the Sicilian Mafia. He was the boss of the Santa Maria di Gesù Family in Palermo. He was also known as the Principe di Villagrazia − the area of Palermo he controlled − and Il Falco. He had links with several powerful politicians in Sicily, and with prime minister Giulio Andreotti. In 1981 he was killed by the rival faction within Cosa Nostra, the Corleonesi. His death sparked a brutal Mafia War that left several hundred mafiosi dead.
Salvatore Inzerillo was an Italian member of the Sicilian Mafia, also known as Totuccio. He rose to be a powerful boss of Palermo's Passo di Rigano family. A prolific heroin trafficker, he was killed in May 1981 by a firing squad of the Corleonesi family led by Totò Riina during the Second Mafia War who opposed the established Palermo Mafia families of which Inzerillo was one of the main proponents.
Excellent Cadavers is a 1995 non-fiction book by American author Alexander Stille about the Sicilian Mafia, concentrating on magistrate Giovanni Falcone's fight against the Mafia and his 1992 assassination.
Antonio Gava was an Italian politician and member of Christian Democracy (DC). Son of the 13-time minister Silvio Gava, Antonio was one of the Christian Democratic Party's leading power-brokers in Campania over a 25-year period, beginning in 1968 and ending in 1993, when he was charged with membership of a criminal organisation. Together with Arnaldo Forlani and Vincenzo Scotti, he was the leader of DC's current known as "Alleanza Popolare".
The Pizza Connection Trial was a criminal trial against the Sicilian and American mafias that took place before the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York in New York City, U.S. The trial centered on a number of independently owned pizza parlor fronts used to distribute drugs, which had imported US$1.65 billion of heroin from Southwest Asia to the United States between 1975 and 1984. The trial lasted from September 30, 1985, to March 2, 1987, ending with 18 convictions, with sentences handed down on June 22, 1987. Lasting about 17 months, it was the longest trial in the judicial history of the United States.
Pitigrilli was the pseudonym of Dino Segre,, an Italian writer who made his living as a journalist and novelist. His most noted novel was Cocaina, published under his pseudonym and placed on the list of prohibited books by the Catholic Church because of his treatment of drug use and sex. It has been translated into several languages and re-issued in several editions. Pitigrilli published novels up until 1974, the year before his death.
Leonardo Vitale was a member of the Sicilian Mafia who was one of the first to become an informant, or pentito, although originally his confessions were not taken seriously. Vitale was a "man of honour" or member of the Altarello di Baida cosca or family, Altarello being a small village just outside Palermo.
Salvatore Contorno, called Totuccio, is a former member of the Sicilian Mafia who turned into a state witness (pentito) against Cosa Nostra in October 1984, following the example of Tommaso Buscetta. He gave detailed accounts of the inner-workings of the Sicilian Mafia. His testimonies were crucial in the Maxi Trial against the Sicilian Mafia in Palermo and the Pizza Connection trial in New York City in the mid 1980s.
Rosario Riccobono was a member of the Sicilian Mafia. He was the boss of Partanna Mondello, a suburb of Palermo, his native city. In 1974 he became a member of the Sicilian Mafia Commission. During the 1970s Riccobono was one of the most influential members of the Commission, and the Cosa Nostra's king of the drug trafficking.
Antonio Salamone was a member of the Sicilian Mafia and a member of the first Sicilian Mafia Commission. His nickname was “il furbo” – the shrewd one.
Salvatore Cancemi was an Italian mobster and member of the Sicilian Mafia from Palermo. He is the first member of the Sicilian Mafia Commission that turned himself in voluntarily to become a pentito, a collaborator with the Italian judicial authorities. Cancemi made controversial allegations about the collusion of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and his right-hand man Marcello Dell'Utri with the Mafia.
Leonardo "Narduzzo" Messina is a Sicilian former mafioso who became a government informant or "pentito" in 1992. His testimony led to the arrest of over 200 mafiosi during the so-called "Operation Leopard". Messina has implicated several politicians and government officials with ties to Sicilian Mafia, in particular Giulio Andreotti, seven times Prime Minister for Italy.
Bruno Contrada is the former police chief of Palermo and deputy director of the civil intelligence service SISDE who was arrested based on revelations of former Sicilian Mafiosi turned pentiti, Gaspare Mutolo and Giuseppe Marchese.
The Lost Books of the Odyssey is a 2007 novel by Zachary Mason, republished in 2010. It is a reimagination of Homer's Odyssey.
Antonino Scopelliti was an Italian prosecuting magistrate, murdered by the 'Ndrangheta on behalf of the Sicilian Mafia.
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