A House in the Mountains

October 15, 2019
In the final volume of the Resistance Quartet, Moorehead (A Bold and Dangerous Family, 2017) continues her work exalting the women of World War II who saved their countries from fascism. The author now turns to the Piedmont region of Northern Italy and the city of Turin, which was a hotbed of fascism but also the epicenter of the resistance. Moorehead relies heavily on the diaries of participant Ada Gobetti, who, along with Bianca Serra, Frida Malan, and Silvia Pons, formed a core group within the thousands of women who drove the resistance from 1943 to 1945. Under 20 years of Mussolini's rule, women were expected to be submissive and produce children. "One of the key beliefs in Fascist ideology," writes the author, "was that men and women were inherently different." But being ignored as insignificant made them perfect couriers and concealers of messages, escapees, and arms. These women, who produced underground newspapers, led strikes, and transported escapees, were crucial to the resistance, and Moorehead clearly delineates their determination and heroism throughout the exciting narrative. After Mussolini's fall, Italy secured an armistice with the Allies, but the Germans moved in to take over the country. Thus, a multifaceted war began, but was it civil war, a war of liberation, or a class war? With multiple governments and armies, it was chaotic. The Italian army had little leadership, and most of the soldiers abandoned their posts. With more than 100,000 disbanded soldiers, it fell to the women to help. In the Piedmont hills, a dozen separate groups eventually winnowed down to a six-party coalition while help from the Allies was difficult to find. Turin's Liberation Day, April 26, 1945, was organized by the women of the resistance and featured a complete stoppage of factories, trams, courts, and shops. The partisan groups, men and women, quickly established government offices and handled expected reprisals. This is a highly satisfying conclusion to the author's series. Excellent, well-presented evidence of the incalculable strengths and abilities of women to create and run a country.

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November 18, 2019
Historian Moorehead (A Bold and Dangerous Family) concludes her Resistance Quartet with an overly dense account of the role Italian partisans, many of them women, played in helping the Allies win WWII. Contending that the story of female resistance fighters has long been neglected, Moorehead focuses on four women from the Piedmont region and begins their story in 1943, when the sudden overthrow of Benito Mussolini’s government in Rome led to tightened German control over Northern Italy and fomented rebellion in the region. “Fascism had trapped them in domesticity and segregation,” Moorehead writes of women who joined the resistance as couriers, lookouts, and weapons smugglers, but their new lives gave them “the chance to decide their own fates.” Ada Gobetti held secret meetings at her house in Turin and helped to establish contacts between Italian Resistance leaders and French and British military officials. Bianca Serra organized antifascist action committees in the city’s factories and edited underground newspapers. Female partisans hoped to achieve a long list of reforms in postwar Italy, including paid maternity leave and equal wages, but their hopes were mainly dashed, according to Moorehead. She uncovers many fascinating stories, but she bogs the narrative down with secondary characters and accounts of well-known events. History buffs will wish this promising account had a sharper focus.

Starred review from November 1, 2019
When Mussolini fell in 1943, Italian anti-Fascists hoped to build a free society. Instead, Germany occupied northern Italy, and for the next two years, anti-Fascist partisans fought Nazis and resurgent Italian Fascists while navigating the politics of Italian resistance and Allied reluctance to accept them as fellow-fighters instead of defeated enemies. In this deeply moving, beautifully told history, biographer and historian Moorehead (A Bold and Dangerous Family, 2017) shares the story of northern Italian resistance during WWII, focusing on the anti-Fascists of Turin. Their diverse movement included Jews and Catholics, workers, peasants, intellectuals, and, perhaps most surprisingly, women as well as men. Throwing off cultural norms and Fascist insistence that women should be passive, domestic, and apolitical, they became guerrillas, strategists, and spies, risking their lives for their convictions. Some, like the teacher and translator Ada Gobetti, whose story is central to the narrative, rose to positions of authority and imagined a revolutionary future of equality between the sexes. Gobetti and her fellow stafette were unable to realize this dream, but as we near the seventy-fifth anniversary of the end of WWII, Moorehead has restored their achievements and those of the Italian resistance to view in this superb and significant chronicle.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

Starred review from December 1, 2019

In the months between the fall of Mussolini's Fascist government in 1943 and the Allied victory in 1945, the people of Turin and the Italian Piedmont suffered tremendously. Caught between invading Germans, Fascist groups reasserting control, and the Allied bombing campaign, thousands of Italians took to the hills to survive. Moorehead (A Bold and Dangerous Family), in the final book of her "Resistance Quartet" series tells the incredible story of the stafetta, women of the Italian resistance. The staffetta worked a variety of jobs within the partisan groups; transporting explosives and weapons and serving as lookouts as well as mending clothes and cooking for fighters. Many women also rose into the leadership ranks of the partisans. Despite the sacrifices many of these women made, including with their lives, it was decades before they received the recognition they deserved as combatants and for the role they played in liberating Italy from Fascist and Nazi rule. Based on extensive archival research, this is a fine history that centers women in the story of the Italian resistance. VERDICT Recommended for those interested in World War II and women's history.--Chad E. Statler, Westlake Porter P.L., Westlake, OH

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2019

In this final volume in her "Resistance Quartet," begun with the New York Times best-selling A Train in Winter and chronicling women's participation in the Resistance during World War II, Moorehead focuses on four Piedmontese women who battled Mussolini's fascist regime. By 1943, they had had joined with thousands of others to help the Allies push German troops out of Italy. With a 75,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 4, 2019
Psychologist Levine (Teach Your Children Well) offers a practical, wise manual aimed at helping anxious parents with their often equally anxious kids. According to her, overprotective parenting commonly leads to two problems: “accumulated disability,” or “the impairment of life skills,” in kids, and “learned helplessness,” the “belief that you are powerless to change your circumstances.” With empathy, Levine explores the valid anxiety parents and children feel about facing a “world of disconcerting unpredictability and upheaval” and lays out the “foundational” skills children need to develop: critical thinking, curiosity, creativity, flexibility, educated risk-taking, collaboration, perseverance, self-regulation, and the “ultimate life skills: hope and optimism.” Levine also emphasizes the ability to thrive amid uncertainty, illustrated with stories of people who have evinced this skill, both famous—Steve Jobs, who survived being fired from his own company—and not—a medical technician who fled her native South Vietnam at age 15. While the issues raised are relatively familiar, Levine pulls together a solid set of recommendations for dealing with them. Plenty of parents will benefit from her treatise on how to prepare children for an uncertain future.