100 books like Sawdust Caesar

Scobie presents a concise exposition of the Nazis’ inferiority complex vis-à-vis imperial Rome.

Hitler, ever a fan of grotesque gigantomania, found a soulmate in Albert Speer. Their designs for rebuilding major cities on Roman principles became reality only to a small degree.

The apex was to have been Berlin, renamed Germania, as world capital. Its most stupendous building, modeled on but dwarfing the Pantheon in Rome, was the Great Hall (also People’s Hall, Hall of Glory). It was to accommodate 180,000 standing people. Above it a copper-plated dome sixteen times the size of St. Peter’s in Rome was to have risen.

Inside, the balcony from which Hitler was to deliver his addresses would have made him appear tiny. The contrast exemplifies the essence of Kitsch: unrestrained grandiosity turns ridiculous.

Solomon’s gargantuan tome is a labor of love, offering a comprehensive tribute to General Lew Wallace’s epic historical novel Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, from 1880.

Solomon traces its genesis, composition (during which Wallace, previously not a devout believer, saw the light), publication, and sensational worldwide impact in all manner of modern media, which even included Ben-His and Ben-Hers towels.

After stage adaptations with thrilling on-stage chariot races, the cinema took over. The appropriately big MGM production of 1959 can boast what was for decades believed to be the most spectacular action sequence ever filmed. In a nod to contemporary politics, an Arab sheik puts a Star of David on Ben-Hur just before the race. And the film’s Romans closely resemble Nazis—not for the first or last time.

Fast ran afoul of the House Committee on Un-American Activities and was sent to prison for contempt of Congress.

To him, as to Karl Marx and others, the gladiator Spartacus, who led history’s best-known slave revolt (73 to 71 B.C.), symbolized the proletariat’s revolution against capitalist oppressors and depraved imperialists.

Despite some dubious history and one distasteful distortion concerning the Romans’ exploitation of slaves, Fast’s 1951 novel is a stirring tale, intended “so that the dream of Spartacus may come to be in our own time.”

When no publisher would touch his book, Fast had it printed and distributed on his own.

The screenplay for Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation was by Dalton Trumbo, another HUAC victim. His screen credits for Spartacus and, a little earlier, for Exodus ended the blacklist.

Richards’ book broadens the perspective advanced here with a concise overview of American and British films and some American-European co-productions about ancient Greek, Roman, biblical, and other cultures.

Its main focus is on the 1950s and 1960s, when epic filmmaking reached its height with color and widescreen cinematography, giant sets, huge casts, stereophonic sound, extreme lengths, and ruinous costs.

Richards rides to the rescue of several less-than-stellar films but can be severe as well, e.g. about 300: “probably the most Fascistic film to come out in cinemas since the fall of the Third Reich.” (No argument here.)

A few inaccuracies concerning antiquity and cinematic details detract from the book’s value, but they are instructive, since errors can create new fictions from the fictions that films invariably create from history.

This is a dazzling mix of theory, sociology, and history. Falasca-Zamponi is attentive to the myths, rituals, festivals and ceremonies, symbols, and recurring images of Italian fascism—and she is attentive, too, to the political power that Mussolini relentlessly drew from such cultural forms.

With tremendous analytical imagination, Falasca-Zamponi unpacks the significance of the fascist salute, Mussolini’s balcony poses, all the axe-and-bundle imagery, those omnipresent black shirts, and the fascists’ distinctive “passo romano” marching style. For me, the heart of the book is its intense analysis of fascist violence as spectacle. Not just spectacle, though. Falasca-Zamponi also makes the case that for the early fascists violence—“great, beautiful, inexorable violence,” in Mussolini’s words—was sublime, regenerative, glorious, salvific.

The early fascists made violence, Falasca-Zamponi suggests, as if it were art. 

In her decades of work on Italy’s Fascist era, Marla Stone has shown an especially keen eye for the development of the regime’s policies and ideologies, whether in the sphere of art and culture, or that of political violence and imperialist aggression. Here Stone offers a succinct and penetrating overview of the origins, rise, consolidation, and eventual crash of Fascism in Italy, followed by a translation of some three dozen primary documents—about a third of which were otherwise unavailable in English—to illustrate her narrative. Particularly chilling are the propaganda texts from 1938 on, when Mussolini’s grandiose claims to the legacy of ancient Rome took a back seat to full-blown racial politics, “as Italians were declared ‘Aryans’ and biological anti-Semitism became part of official ideology.”

This ferocious little book is brilliant. It’s as much about how to fight fascism as it is about fascism itself, but it’s still a good place to start figuring out how the fascists came to power in Italy.

The key thing to grasp, Behan insists, is that there was nothing inevitable about Benito Mussolini’s rise (hence the “resistible” in the title, which is also a clever homage to Bertolt Brecht’s classic antifascist allegory, his 1941 play The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui). Behan’s big point is that if the foes of early Italian fascism had all worked together and resisted, they could have smashed fascism before it got going. 

This famous novel tells the story from the other side, a socialist on the run, in fascist Italy. Certain unforgettable scenes portray the bullying and humiliation at the core of fascism and its human cost. I first read this in college, then re-read it when I was conducting research on Mussolini’s Italy.

This book rewrites the story of how Roman imperialism got started. It is written by one of the best archaeologists in the field, and it shows. It is brilliantly illustrated, and it explains the world into which Rome emerged. Instead of the traditional story of virtuous Roman heroes and bold wars of conquest, it shows why other Italian peoples decided to join up with Rome. We get a sense of how other Italians saw things. And we understand how the ruling families, Roman and Italian alike, came together and built a state that would conquer the Mediterranean in all their interests. Revolutionary!

I could have broken the rules and just listed five books by Caroline Moorehead here. I love her writing; her highly-researched biographies are a joy to read and utterly immersive. I chose A House in the Mountains because it shows me what it’s like to survive the hardscrabble blow-by-blow of daily life under an occupying army, and how you can defeat it. The five women whose lives in the Italian Resistance during WWII she chronicles here are models of courage and creative resistance to tyranny.