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The Woman Who Shot Mussolini Books

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The Woman Who Shot Mussolini Books

This is history at its fascinating best. Smartly researched and very well written, The Woman Who Shot Mussolini takes the little known story about on attempt on il Duce's life and extends it to cover so many other deeply interesting aspects of 20th century European history. In April 1926, the Hon. Violet Gibson, a mentally fragile Anglo-Irish aristocrat, fired a revolver at the head of Benito Mussolini from a foot away; she missed, only taking a divot out of his nose. A minor event, but Saunders ties it in with the story of the Protestant Ascendency in Ireland, Italian politics, the practice of psychiatry, and much else. Gibson herself remains, as she was in life, a bit of a blur, but that is certainly no fault of the author who uses fresh documents to track what was a tragic arc of a life unfulfilled. And there is no better brief look at the tragedy that the odious Mussolini rained down on Italy.

Product details Hardcover Publisher Metropolitan Books; First Edition edition Language English ASIN B0058M5ZX2

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The Woman Who Shot Mussolini Books Reviews

If you're willing to look up a word every few pages in this beautifully-crafted historical narrative, this is great read, and timely too.

The story itself is about a woman who spent her life in an asylum because she, among others, tried to do Italy a favor by attempting to rid the world a silver-tongued dictator who early on enjoyed immense popularity.

This narrative's backdrop portrays a dictator who seamlessly incorporated the acting techniques of his day into his oratory to garner the adulation of adoring crowds and a sycophantic press who believed he was sent to them by God, who occupied and pillaged Libya, who silenced and imprisoned his political opposition, and who ran his country into the ground during two decades of one-party rule.

This dictator and his mistress finally met an ignominious end at the hands of angry partisans who shot them and then strung their carcasses up from a gas station sign for all to see.

A passage in one of the book's concluding chapters makes a great observation about the empty promises of fascism and adoring low-information voters that speaks as much to our day as it does to 1940's Italy.

"'Fascism only regiments those who can't do anything without it,' Ezra Pound said, and though his judgments were often wildly distorted, in this he was right. For all its high-octane, vitalist rhetoric, its new roads and high speed trains, fascism actually profited from inertia. Politically, the regime was daring in words but conservative and prudent in deeds; it was a revolution that, lacking a central ideological core, only ever revolved around itself - a vortex of narcissism. The contradiction was lost on the cowlike crowds who stopped thinking for themselves, preferring to chew the cud of more than two decades of stupefaction."
When people ask me what I read I usually say something like, "I'll read anything." I have no grudges with any particular genre, and I've read bits and pieces of just about everything. But the truth is that I don't read outside of YA/Children's lit very often. So when I read something like this I'm given pause while I'm like... can't tell if poor prose... or just unfamiliar genre style...
There were a couple of tense shifts, and the narrative tone changed quite a bit. It was pretty clear that the author is really invested in this subject, and sometimes the narrator became a little protective of Violet. Sometimes the narrator was also really, really funny.
I found Saunders relied a lot on the information of sources that were only tangentially related, like the Fitzgeralds and the Joyces. I liked when she drew the parallels, but sometimes a.) she went on a long tangent and there was too much information and b.) sometimes she tried to relate it too closely and it wasn't always helpful.

These small problems aside, I really enjoyed this book. There were some parts that were so ridiculous, like when part of Violet's insanity defense was that you'd have to be insane to want to kill Mussolini (her lawyer was a freaking genius, btw). If you tried to write that in fiction, no one would buy it. Real life, man.
Parts of it were really, really horrifying. When it started talking about some of the cures for "madness" in women... it was nothing short of torture. I had no idea things like that were still happening even up to WWII. Some of the beliefs about women, and the way they were treated... it makes me feel ill. Some things you can't un-know. But I also wouldn't want to un-know them; these things are important, our history is important. So if only for that reason, it's an important book.
I had been watching the author as she is related to ancestry work I have done on the Stonors. Just comparing a shirtless Mussolini with Putin is a rave.
Good, fast read about a woman whom history forgot. She probably would have done Italy a favor had she succeeded.
interesting
This is history at its fascinating best. Smartly researched and very well written, The Woman Who Shot Mussolini takes the little known story about on attempt on il Duce's life and extends it to cover so many other deeply interesting aspects of 20th century European history. In April 1926, the Hon. Violet Gibson, a mentally fragile Anglo-Irish aristocrat, fired a revolver at the head of Benito Mussolini from a foot away; she missed, only taking a divot out of his nose. A minor event, but Saunders ties it in with the story of the Protestant Ascendency in Ireland, Italian politics, the practice of psychiatry, and much else. Gibson herself remains, as she was in life, a bit of a blur, but that is certainly no fault of the author who uses fresh documents to track what was a tragic arc of a life unfulfilled. And there is no better brief look at the tragedy that the odious Mussolini rained down on Italy.