Excellent Cadavers

In 1992 Italy was convulsed by two brazen Mafia assassinations of high-ranking officials. The latest "excellent cadavers" were Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, the Sicilian magistrates who had been the Cosa Nostra's most implacable enemies. Yet in the aftermath of the murders, hundreds of "men of honor" were arrested and the government that ad protected them for nearly half a century was at last driven from office. This is the story that Stille tells with such insight and immediacy in Excellent Cadavers. Combining a profound understanding of his doomed heroes with and unprecedented look into the Mafia's stringent codes and murderous rivalries, he gives us a book that has the power of a great work of history and the suspense of a true thriller. "Riveting...a well-paced and highly informative account stocked with well-drawn characters."--Philadelphia Inquirer "Masterful...[Stille] delivers a stiletto-sharp portrait of the bloodthirsty Sicilian mafia."--Business Week

A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year A New York Public Library Best Book of the Year From the author of M and A Death in Brazil comes Midnight in Sicily. South of mainland Italy lies the island of Sicily, home to an ancient culture that--with its stark landscapes, glorious coastlines, and extraordinary treasure troves of art and archeology--has seduced travelers for centuries. But at the heart of the island's rare beauty is a network of violence and corruption that reaches into every corner of Sicilian life: Cosa Nostra, the Mafia. Peter Robb lived in southern Italy for over fourteen years and recounts its sensuous pleasures, its literature, politics, art, and crimes.

In Paper Cadavers, an inside account of the astonishing discovery and rescue of Guatemala's secret police archives, Kirsten Weld probes the politics of memory, the wages of the Cold War, and the stakes of historical knowledge production. After Guatemala's bloody thirty-six years of civil war (1960–1996), silence and impunity reigned. That is, until 2005, when human rights investigators stumbled on the archives of the country's National Police, which, at 75 million pages, proved to be the largest trove of secret state records ever found in Latin America. The unearthing of the archives renewed fierce debates about history, memory, and justice. In Paper Cadavers, Weld explores Guatemala's struggles to manage this avalanche of evidence of past war crimes, providing a firsthand look at how postwar justice activists worked to reconfigure terror archives into implements of social change. Tracing the history of the police files as they were transformed from weapons of counterinsurgency into tools for post-conflict reckoning, Weld sheds light on the country's fraught transition from war to an uneasy peace, reflecting on how societies forget and remember political violence.

Examines the different ways people die, the role of the medical examiner, and what happens to the body after death.

The mafia has always fascinated filmmakers and television producers. Al Capone, Salvatore Giuliano, Lucky Luciano, Ciro Di Marzio, Roberto Saviano, Don Vito and Michael Corleone, and Tony Soprano are some of the historical and fictional figures that contribute to the myth of the Italian and Italian-American mafias perpetuated onscreen. This collection looks at mafia movies and television over time and across cultures, from the early classics to the Godfather trilogy and contemporary Italian films and television series. The only comprehensive collection of its type, Mafia Movies treats over fifty films and TV shows created since 1906, while introducing Italian and Italian-American mafia history and culture. The second edition includes new original essays on essential films and TV shows that have emerged since the publication of the first edition, such as Boardwalk Empire and Mob Wives, as well as a new roundtable section on Italy’s “other” mafias in film and television, written as a collaborative essay by more than ten scholars. The edition also introduces a new section called “Double Takes” that elaborates on some of the most popular mafia films and TV shows (e.g. The Godfather and The Sopranos) organized around themes such as adaptation, gender and politics, urban spaces, and performance and stardom.

This book explores contemporary American true crime narratives across various media formats. It dissects the popularity of true crime and the effects, both positive and negative, this popularity has on perceptions of crime and the justice system in contemporary America. As a collection of new scholarship on the development, scope, and character of true crime in twenty-first century American media, analyses stretch across film, streaming/broadcast TV, podcasts, and novels to explore the variety of ways true crime pervades modern culture. The reader is guided through a series of interconnected topics, starting with an examination of the contemporary success of true crime, the platforms involved, the narrative structures and engagement with audiences, moving on to debates on representation and the ethics involved in portraying both victims and perpetrators of crime within the genre. This collection provides new critical work on American true crime media for all interested readers, and especially scholars and students in the humanities and social sciences. It offers a significant area of research in social sciences, criminology, media, and English Literature academic disciplines.

In the early hours of an August 2007 morning a gunfight broke out in an Italian restaurant in Duisburg, Germany; in less than five minutes over seventy shots were fired into the bodies of six men. Both the victims and the assassins were members of the 'Ndrangheta crime organization. Calabria's Mafia had brazenly shown its savage influence outside Italy for the first time. In The Honored Society award-winning investigative reporter Petra Reski reveals the Mafia menace lurking throughout the world-- from espresso bars in Palermo to European halls of parliament to the corporate headquarters of enormous agricultural firms. In haunting and exquisite prose she explores the Byzantine structure of the 'Ndrangheta, Cosa Nostra and other mafia clans throughout Italy -- the code they live by, the destruction they wreak, how they operate within the country and how they operate internationally. She shows how these syndicates dominate everything from nuclear waste disposal to hotel chains to the marijuana trade in Australia and cocaine trafficked throughout the world. Reski shows how figures such as Silvio Berlusconi were made by the Mafia, and how those who dared to defy its codes were broken. A searing portrait of the criminals who have come to control not only Italy but vast swathes of the globe, The Honored Society is a journalistic tour de force.

In 1992 Italy was convulsed by two brazen Mafia assassinations of high-ranking officials. The latest "excellent cadavers" were Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, the Sicilian magistrates who had been the Cosa Nostra's most implacable enemies. Yet in the aftermath of the murders, hundreds of "men of honor" were arrested and the government that ad protected them for nearly half a century was at last driven from office. This is the story that Stille tells with such insight and immediacy in Excellent Cadavers. Combining a profound understanding of his doomed heroes with and unprecedented look into the Mafia's stringent codes and murderous rivalries, he gives us a book that has the power of a great work of history and the suspense of a true thriller. "Riveting...a well-paced and highly informative account stocked with well-drawn characters."--Philadelphia Inquirer "Masterful...[Stille] delivers a stiletto-sharp portrait of the bloodthirsty Sicilian mafia."--Business Week "From the Trade Paperback edition.