Customer Rating:  
Summary: I smell something here
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: "Nothing is lost. Nothing is created. Everything is transformed."
Comment:
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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Gomorrah
Comment: 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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Summary: The only thing you learn in the black hole of Naples is how to die
Comment: In going undercover, R. Saviano experienced at first hand the Mafia at work in the Naples region.
It is a story of savage infighting, bid-rigging, trafficking and relentless slaughtering of competition.
Economics
Mafia business is one of the most aggressive forms of neoliberalism. It is a naked struggle among clans in order to create monopolies and to maximize profits. Their activities cover as different sectors as real estate, construction, cement, garment, farming, sugar and trafficking of drugs, cigarettes, arms and waste. A clan cartel could generate as much as 30 billion euros of revenues per year.
The author also clearly explains the bidding contest for contracts in the garment industry, where small `illegal' factories with harsh working conditions are tailoring even unique pieces for the top names in the industry.
Ethics and creed
For the Mafia, ethics equal protection of the defeated. Justice and injustice have only significance as victory or defeat. The only thing that counts is the law of the strongest, are the means to rule.
Its members don't consider their activities as contradictory to the Christian message as long as those activities are good for the clan and its affiliates. Killing of enemies and traitors is seen as a legitimate transgression of the fifth commandment.
Lifestyle
Once in a commanding position, most bosses are confronted with the long arm of the law. They are always on the run and are not capable of enjoying their wealth. They become prisoners of their own business empire.
A big part of the book unravels a secession war between Mafia families and the killing of a priest. The relentless bestial slaughterings become rather boring and can only be fully appreciated by insiders.
Roberto Saviano wrote a courageous book exposing business empires built on monopolies, extortion and brutal power struggles. It is a picture of a lawless society.
Highly recommended.
Customer Rating:
Summary: an eye opener
Comment: It's not about the story or the writing. It's what it says; and how. Reading this book you tend to imaging it's about some far away place, surely this must not be Italy. But it is. This was an eye opener to me. There's so many different aspects covered in this book, you'll be surprised at how much you didn't know or had never heard about. A phenomenal book that should be read by everyone.
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