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Gomorrah | 
 enlarge | Author: Roberto Saviano
Creator: Virginia Jewiss
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
List Price: $25.00
Buy New: $16.50
You Save: $8.50 (34%)
New (4) Used (7) from $13.38
Rating:  45 reviews
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1st
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.2
ISBN: 0374165270
Dewey Decimal Number: 364.1060945
EAN: 9780374165277
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
A groundbreaking major bestseller in Italy, Gomorrah is Roberto Saviano’s gripping nonfiction account of the decline of Naples under the rule of the Camorra, an organized crime network with a large international reach and stakes in construction, high fashion, illicit drugs, and toxic-waste disposal. Known by insiders as “the System,” the Camorra affects cities and villages along the Neapolitan coast, and is the deciding factor in why Campania, for instance, has the highest murder rate in all of Europe and whycancer levels there have skyrocketed in recent years.
Saviano tells of huge cargoes of Chinese goods that are shipped to Naples and then quickly distributed unchecked across Europe. He investigates the Camorra’s control of thousands of Chinese factories contracted to manufacture fashion goods, legally and illegally, for distribution around the world, and relates the chilling details of how the abusive handling of toxic waste is causing devastating pollution not only for Naples but also China and Somalia. In pursuit of his subject, Saviano worked as an assistant at a Chinese textile manufacturer, a waiter at a Camorra wedding, and on a construction site. A native of the region, he recalls seeing his first murder at the age of fourteen, and how his own father, a doctor, suffered a brutal beating for trying to aid an eighteen-year-old victim who had been left for dead in the street.
Gomorrah is a bold and important work of investigative writing that holds global significance, one heroic young man's impassioned story of a place under the rule of a murderous organization.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 40 more reviews...
 a great book January 7, 2009
this is an excellent book. His literary style reminds me of the 'raw facts' style of Capote, but a prose all his own. Its a scathing read, unrelenting towards its goal of naming every last name possible involved with the Camorra. I havent really sat down and read a book from front to back since high school... about 8 years ago. This one took me by surprise. If you think organized crime is just for the movies, or all you know about it is the godfather and scarface, this will open your eyes quite a bit. highly recommended.
Naples underworld, gamorrah January 6, 2009
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Gomorrah: A Personal Journey into the Violent International Empire of Naples' Organized Crime System
good story. Scary truth.
 I smell something here December 30, 2008
I'm a hundred pages into this overrated book and loud alarms are going off, the same sort of alarms that went off when I read "A Million Little Pieces" and "Running With Scissors." I will finish the book because it is reasonably compelling and because I love Italy, but I just don't believe everything I'm taking in. The book also seems without focus and at times the prose is heavy handed. The irony is that "Gomorrah" isn't nearly as organized as the crime network it describes. From the reviews, I expected a lot more.
"Nothing is lost. Nothing is created. Everything is transformed." December 21, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
In Gomorrah, Saviano wades through the gates of hell, revealing the extent of criminal enterprise in southern Naples, the long tentacles of the Camorra infecting every aspect of business from the port of Naples to the interior. Inland, cement cities house men and women who work long days in fashion sweatshops, where every aspect of life is controlled by the Camorra, from the lowliest waiter to the massive factories that produce counterfeit materials. Saviano begins this undercover journey at the port, where the great engine of Chinese business ingenuity gobbles opportunity, learning, adapting, growing, replacing. For every legal shipment of goods, there are shadow shipments headed toward a greedy market, an endless network of goods and services, a fusion of fashion and greed, the profit going to the quickest and the best.
This elaborate business network is also social, entire families in service on one level or another, women as well as men. Production never ceases, the workers hunkered down in their cement hives, creating goods, every phase of production strictly monitored for maximum profit. This expose is like a vast sea roiling with activity, collateral deaths absorbed by the whole, warring factions breaking out in bursts of gunfire from AK-47s, bodies scattered like so much refuse, expeditiously swept away so business as usual can resume. From the Port and the intricate partnerships of fashion and export to the cities where product is manufactured, Saviano describes all as though his eyes a camera, intimate photographs of the power structure, the deals, the graft, the rise and fall of personalities, the purging of those who dare interfere, including powerful government officials.
In this marrying of crime to the global economy, there is a pervasive sense of inevitability, humanity bred out of a society driven by commerce, except the few who rise to fame by virtue of their power, only to disappear, replaced by others, the ebb and flow of greed and expedience. Violence goes hand in hand with life lived on such terms, a killing field quickly obliterated by goods in transport. Saviano doesn't shirk from names or detail, either: "I know how economics originate and where their smell comes from." From fashion to building, each part is integral to profit: "Cement makers create a supply system that keeps the clan in touch with contractors, linking to every possible deal, with extortion a secondary service." The implications of this book are staggering, a vision of the future stripped bare, every level of society infected by greed: "There is not a minute in which the business of living does not seem like a life sentence." This is a story that should be told. Luan Gaines/2008.
Gomorrah December 14, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
I'll admit that I learned of Roberto Saviano's Gomorrah not from a movie, or word of mouth on the quality of Saviano's writing but from the threats of death Saviano now has marked from the Cammora for writing the book. Thats an odd bit of advertisement for his work especially since Saviano's death threats are for breaking some code of silence. In threatening his death the Cammora gave Saviano his best publicity.
So how does the book rate outside of the award winning film or Saviano's sad fate? For one its a very detailed analysis starting at the port of Naples where supposedly all the worlds goods arrive on their way to the west. Through this has sprung up from the Cammora the sale of counterfeit goods using cheap inexpensive labor to make products under name labels. Saviano lays these details helped along by the Chinese who take products from the ships before they reach port. From there Saviano imparts a length of information pertaining to clan wars in a region called Secondigliano resulting from a boss who wanted to cinch up internal strife, and was said to be so violent the morturay van ran its tires bald to other elements including the use of the Kalishnikov asault rifle-to test their guns criminals fire into store windows and shutters not because of a vendetta but because they own the company supplying businesses plexi glass, to the role of women who are sometimes the most violent members of the clans. In the end He finishes with a role Hollywood plays into the image of the Camorra primarily using The Godfather and Scarface with the story of two young boys who met a sad fate because of their idolization of Tony Montana. In the end He wraps up his book with a story on the enviromental crisis the Camorra is enacting with the help of Stockholders in using cheaper labor and rented land to dump toxic waste with the help of children drivers dying slowly from breathing in leaking toxic waste.
In between this Saviano imparts his own history, on seeing his first murder victim at age thirteen who had been gunned down in the street and died with an erection. To his father who while working as on ambulance decided to save an eighteen year old boy bleeding to death and was severely beaten by Cammora who would stop ambulances to finish off anyone who hadn't died from the result of their injuries due to a hit. I will say I'm not a big reader of non-fiction. When I do read books like these I dislike when writers impart their own opinions and feelings into their writing. I like impartiality and throughout the book Saviano breaks this letting himself pontificate too much on the state of things running his fingers over bullet holes or looking at the burned out cars of a murder victim. I was fully ready to hold this against Saviano but the thought of a man who's grown up in this life and witnessed violence since He was thirteen made me forgive this fault especially when He relates the death of a fourteen year old girl who's only fault was to be caught in the crossfire to assassins and their victim. This section made me believe in the importance of the book especially after reading about innocent people tortured to death because they were family members related to clan member or the murder of a soldiers aunt by a group of sixteen year old boys.
I'll admit that while Saviano imparts a great deal of information impartial or other wise that can sometimes be the novels only failing to me. I don't mind reading into details like operations of counterfitting operations starting from a betting war that takes place in an abandoned school but there are lot of names and statistics that I will admit can make for a lot of confusion. I know Saviano wanted provide as much information as possible for his book but I'll admit at times I did find myself zoning out especially when theres talk of over a fifty different nicknames for gangsters.
With all said and done I did enjoy the book quiet a lot. Maybe not as much as I'd hoped but enough to recommend it even if its about the most despairing subject possible.
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