100 books like Target

What I loved about this book is that it is the true story of an American woman living in Nazi-occupied France, where she organised and ran resistance groups and led them in action.

The book, though factual, reads like a fictional novel, and her exploits and shear "daring do" almost beggar belief. She only had one leg, a fact that many who met her were completely unaware of, yet she crossed the Pyrenees on foot in winter!

It didn’t surprise me to find out that the men who "ran" the operations from London and Washington denigrated her achievements and consigned her to obscurity, describing her in the words of the book’s title. But she was a truly amazing heroine, and I would have loved to have met her.

I hope to get close to Ben Macintyre’s style, while still keeping the accuracy that my researcher background demands. Many of us know the story, and have even seen the film, of how a dead, fictitious Royal Marines officer, dropped from a submarine off the Spanish coast, fooled the Nazis into thinking Greece would be invaded instead of Sicily. But Macintyre tells it with such drama that the book is a must-read.

Apart from viewing the late Paddy Ashdown as perhaps the best Prime Minister Britain never had, I also know him as an under-recognised author of gripping Second World War books. The community of WW2 researchers is mutually supportive; knowledgeable colleagues have been immensely helpful to me over the years, and I recall helping Paddy with some information for one of his books. Several of them are worth reading, but here he tells the true stories of three men who pitted their wits against each other in the treacherous milieu of wartime France. The stakes were measured in lives, betrayals, and deaths.

I am sure that the authenticity of someone who has ‘been there and done it’ is unchallengeable. Airey Neave, who tragically died in 1979 at the hands of the Irish National Liberation Army, was one such. After successfully escaping from the PoW camp at Colditz, he joined MI9, the War Office section that supported escaping PoWs and downed aircrew. This strikes a chord with me as a former pilot. In this book, he tells the stories of French men and women of all ages and backgrounds, who, at great personal danger, formed the backbone of secret escape lines. The narrative is not over-dramatised and the matter-of-fact style is one I respect, but the courage of those who harboured escapees or acted as couriers comes through clearly. 

It’s a beautiful memoir by a Jewish doctor/painter/political activist who was sent into exile by Mussolini for his anti-fascist political activism. It’s deeply heartfelt and gorgeously written as Levi gets to know the extraordinarily poor peasants of a tiny village in interior southern Italy.

I love all things Italian and so it speaks to me, but I also have a great deal of compassion for the have-nots of this world. Levi describes them with wonderful sympathy and respect (at the same time sharply criticizing the petty bureaucrats and the puffed-up local officials).

Ada Boni's culinary bible, Il talismano della felicità, first saw the light of day in 1928, six years after Benito Mussolini had succeeded in uniting Italy's quarrelsome regions under the banner of fascism.

Specifically targeted at the nation's housewives - ordinary folk on whose support El Duce rose to power in 1922 - this collection of nearly a thousand simple, practical traditional recipes for regional dishes became the dictator's favourite cookbook, as it did for generations of Italian women (still does). 

I first came across it on an Italian friend's recommendation while researching European Peasant Cookery and attempting to unravel the complicated traditions of a land that remains as fiercely partisan in the kitchen now as then. 

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. 

An American journalist, expelled from Italy in 1925, traces roots, rise, and rule of Il Duce in this 1935 book, which is as vivid as its title.

Mussolini appears as a cheap showman, who, “acting the Hero,” revived ancient Roman pomp and spectacles. He was also aware of the power of mass media, especially the cinema, “posing before men and moviemen.”

One of the virtues of Seldes’ book are the extensive quotations, which unmask Mussolini and others in their own words. Fascist documents, quoted at length, include “The Fascist Decalogue” (note its VIII. Commandment!) and the “Fascist Catechism,” which must be read to be (dis)believed.

Seldes’ book has become valuable again in the current age of assorted domestic and foreign media- and image-obsessed demagogues, autocrats, and dictators.

In many ways, this sort of book has gone out of style since it was published in the 1960s.

It’s an opinionated and ambitious portrayal of the Italian psyche and culture. Barzini looks at his fellow Italians with a dispassionate eye and a healthy sense of irreverence, uncovering their foibles, hidden beliefs, superstitions, and great strengths as a culture.

For me, Italy is an eternal paradox. Just when you think you’ve worked it out, something happens that makes you do a double-take. This book helps you understand that paradox has been part of Italy’s identity since the very beginning.

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.