Italy

Discovering the World

By Michael Mayne

Castellina, Luciana. Discovery of the World: A Political Awakening in the Shadow of Mussolini. Trans. Patrick Camiller. London: Verso, 2014. xiv + 194 pp.

Autobiographies by radicals are essential histories of political eras and of individual roles in collective struggle. As these portraits reveal the dialectics of growth and transformation, they prove that we can make our own history, even if not always as we please.
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Middle Games and Possible Communisms

By Ryan Culpepper

Lucio Magri. The Tailor of Ulm: Communism in the Twentieth Century. Trans. Patrick Camiller. Verso, 2011. 434 pp.

The trickiest and most demanding moment in chess is the one that separates the middle game—when many pieces are still on the board, forces still appear level in positions not codified in theory, and each player has a plan of action—from the approach to the endgame.
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