I picked up [link|http://www.amazon.com/Mussolinis-Italy-Fascist-Dictatorship-1915-1945/dp/0143038567/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-2489031-3680034?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1177635520&sr=1-1|this nearly 600-page tome] in Seattle at the end of last month, finally completing it this evening, and a very entertaining and enlightening read it was. I was actually acquainted with this period of Italian history in only the broadest outline (one's attention in the Thirties and Forties is of course more readily drawn to the more luridly demonic tyrannies in Germany and the USSR), and Bosworth's study has filled in much of the missing context. Oddly, Mussolini does not personally loom large in this account (not so odd perhaps—the same author has previously published a biography of Il Duce, which I will seek out anon), which is more concerned with the lives of everyday Italians under the regime.

The full title is Mussolini's Italy: Life under the Fascist Dictatorship, 1915-1945, and the choice of the initial bracketing date, a full seven years before the March on Rome, is telling, as Bosworth traces the rise of the disparate movements that coalesced into fascism to Italy's slightly tardy, moderately opportunistic and indifferently successful entry into the Great War, an undertaking that left a sour aftertaste with most of the principal belligerents. Very late in the book the author quotes (in order to differ on a few points with specific reference to the Italian experience) another author's definition of fascism:

...a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

—Works for me.

It's soberly but entertainingly written, but I did find one particular stylistic tic of the author a bit taxing over time. The Washington Post reviewer puts it nicely:

There is no point in complaining any more about the political correction of academic history, but Bosworth's attempts to pay his dues are sometimes risible. We learn that the remote village of Oschiri was "a place of gender and political contest," which proves to mean the astounding fact that simple peasant women followed the lead of their priest. And Bosworth solemnly tells us "that most enlisted men preferred a masculine interpretation of the gender order." You don't say, professore.

I personally found myself flinching every time the word "gender" appeared on the page. This reservation apart, I warmly recommend the book to anyone who'd care to acquaint himself (Gender politics! Pfffffft!) with this very interesting period of XX Century history.

cordially,