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| The Judge and the Historian: Marginal Notes on a Late-Twentieth-Century Miscarriage of Justice | 
 enlarge | Author: Carlo Ginzburg
Creator: Antony Shugaar
Publisher: Verso
Category: Book
List Price: $16.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 1268140
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 192
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 7.5 x 5.5 x 0.7
ISBN: 1859843719
Dewey Decimal Number: 945
EAN: 9781859843710
ASIN: 1859843719
Publication Date: August 2002
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com Review
The importance of some books cannot be understated: They help place ourselves in the world, ask the right questions, and maintain useful, strategic credulity in the face of brutal empiricism. Sometimes they shed light on those facts, contextualize them, interrogate them, and so hold them up as empty, mendacious, vicious. The Judge and the Historian does this. As well as a concise and persuasive meditation on the convergence and divergence of the roles of its eponymous professionals, the book offers us a path through the tortuous proceedings that led to what the author portrays as a dreadful miscarriage of justice in a modern European state. Italy has always had a particularly active political Left and in the late '60s and early '70s an extraparliamentary faction that descended into propagandist violence. In the so-called Hot Autumn of 1969, a bomb exploded in the Agricultural Bank in Milan, killing 16 people. An anarchist railway man, Giuseppe Pinelli, was taken in for questioning by the police. Three days later, Pinelli (immortalized in Dario Fo's play The Accidental Death of an Anarchist) fell to his death from the window of the police commissioner Luigi Calabresi's office. The police claimed suicide but the Left accused them of murder. In 1972 Calabresi was shot dead in front of his home. The far-left Lotta Continua claimed it was an act of proletarian justice but many think right-wing extremists were involved. After almost 16 years of silence, an ex-militant of Lotta, riven with guilt, gave himself up, claiming responsibility for the murder. Leonardo Marino then implicated the leadership of Lotta in the affair. Carlo Ginzburg, a noted and respected historian, draws on his work on witchcraft trials in the 16th and 17th centuries to dissect the state's case in this late-20th-century show trial. He has written a provocative and passionate book that casts a detailed look at the facts of the case, facts that when presented here cast serious doubt on the judgments reached in Italy early in 1999. Justice is inevitably contextual, and we should consider ourselves lucky to have someone as skilled as Ginzburg in deconstructing its various questionable manifestations. --Mark Thwaite, Amazon.co.uk
Product Description
In The Judge and the Historian, Carlo Ginzburg draws on his work on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century witchcraft trials to dissect the weaknesses and contradictions of Italy's case against Adriano Sofri, figurehead of the Italian Left. Through an analysis of this late-twentieth-century political show-trial, Ginzburg demonstrates the importance of intellectual rigour and passion against political opportunism and dishonesty at the end of the twentieth-century.
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| Customer Reviews:
An Italian Dreyfus Case? May 28, 2000
6 out of 7 found this review helpful
This little book by Carlo Ginzburg is another J'accuse, Zola's powerful indictment of the "investigation" which framed Captain Dreyfus for the espionage he had not committed. The case Ginzburg exposes here is that of three Italian leftists accused of having commissioned (and committed) the murder of a notorious right-wing police investigator in 1972. As Ginzburg makes amply clear, the case at hand is extremely weak and the conviction of the three former leftists a clear miscarriage of justice. The case rests entirely on the plea bargaining representations of someone who in the 1970s had been a close comrade of the three men, and who claims to have been the getaway driver in the murder. Allegedly overcome by guilt, this man decided to tell all to the police, some twenty years after the murder and just a short while before the stature of limitations for the crime expired. Again, as Ginzburg ably shows, the testimony of the would-be driver is full of contradictions, inconsistencies and inaccuracies, and the court that convicted the three went to extreme lengths to discard reliable eyewitness accounts of the murder to accept the self-styled driver's version(s) of events. Unfortunately, the book is not especially reader-friendly. It requires close reading and would probably not appeal very much to someone not conversant with the intricacies of Italian politics and the Byzantine nature of the Italian legal system which can convict someone on clearly flimsy evidence. Such weknesses in the book are a shame, because the issues involved here are potentially of wide appeal. They are also of great relevance to readers interested in history, because of the issues of evidence and proof raised. Ginzburg is a famous historian who has justly earned a world reputation with pathbreaking books like THE NIGHT BATTLES (his first and, to my mind, his best) and THE CHEESE AND THE WORMS (both of which, incidentally, I strongly rtecommend). Those works are based on trial evidence from early modern Italian courts run by the Inquisition, and in the present work, Ginzburg shows the amazing similarity between the investigative procedures for establishing guilt used by the Inquisition more than three-hundred years ago and those used by the modern-day judges who convicted the three men accused of the 1972 murder. Still, THE JUDGE AND THE HISTORIAN makes no attempt to help a reader unfamiliar with the tortured history of Italian politics since the 1970s, and so will prove difficult (and worse, tedious) to all but the bravest. Yet a simple re-drafting could have made this a besteller and brought this case of injustice to world attention.
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