Italian Women at War: Sisters in Arms from the Unification to the Twentieth Century

If it is not surprising that the readership of a thematically based collection of essays will be, primarily, upper-division undergraduates and specialists, it is noteworthy to find one with such a broad-based appeal. Students of Italian studies, whether concerned with history, literature, the cinema, or photography, will find something of interest in this book. The essays, whose temporal focus is exclusively from the Risorgimento through the 20th century, are structured around women's participation in warfare and how society imagined, welcomed, or acknowledged their contributions. This includes discussions of actual women such as the brigantessa (female brigands) in post-unification Sicily and those partigiani struggling against the Nazi and Salò regimes, as well as literary representations of female fighters as found in novels such as Grazia Deledda's Marianna Sirca (1915), or in films such as Liliana Cavanni's The Cannibals (1969). The essay on the life of Eva Kühn Amendola--who was at the crossroads of interventionism, futurism, and Fascism--is especially fascinating.... Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.