Naples '44

As a young intelligence officer stationed in Naples following its liberation from Nazi forces Norman Lewis recorded the lives of a proud and vibrant people forced to survive on prostitution thievery and a desperate belief in miracles and cures. The most popular of Lewiss twenty-seven books Naples 44 is a landmark poetic study of the agony of wartime occupation and its ability to bring out the worst and often the best in human nature. In prose both heartrending and comic Lewis describes an era of disillusionment escapism and hysteria in which the Allied occupiers mete out justice unfairly and fail to provide basic necessities to the populace while Neapolitan citizens accuse each other of being Nazi spies women offer their bodies to the same Allied soldiers whose supplies they steal for sale on the black market and angry young men organize militias to oppose "temporary" foreign rule. Yet over the chaotic din Lewis sings intimately of the essential dignity of the Neapolitan people whose traditions of civility courage and generosity of spirit shine through daily. This essential World War II book is as timely a read as ever.