****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
The author of this book knows how to dramatizize politics. "...something important is happening in Italy, potentially quite sinister, and the seeming normality of life serves to mask it very well." If only it were just a fiction. "Silvio Berlsconi" is a great book on the current state of democracy in Italy, the kind of "modern democracy" heralded by Berlusconi's media empire. If the dictators of the early 20th century have been characterizes as "charismatic leaders" pied pipering away their cults of personality, then today's dictator can be thought of as the sort of highly tailored, well edited "iconic leader," the guy who just LOOKS RIGHT for the job. (Paul Ginsbourg includes a hilarious anecdote in the post-script about Berlusconi who, at a recent press conference, showed up with a face lift he had gotten over Christmas and then proceeds to make the most unfortunate analogy: "The communists...tried to have a face lift in order to hide their real identity, but theirs failed.")As relentlessly critical as Ginsbourg is to Berlusconi, it is hard to ignore the facts of his presidency, both rise to and the policies to follow. It is also hard to ignore the remarkable similarity between the current state of Italian politics and those of the U.S. As Ginsbourg writes, "All this will have a familiar ring in Anglo-Saxon ears."Democracy is becoming increasingly about television and leadership about being televised. What happens to "freedom" in a community connected only by cable? Ginsbourg makes a couple claims of his own, but the exciting aspect of the book is the fact that it raises such questions at all.
