Lowe’s efforts to chronicle [the Four Days of Naples] rebellion...is among the book’s most outstanding contributions ... Lowe’s account is a useful companion, and occasional corrective, to the works of witnesses like Lewis, Malaparte and Burns. But their books are also among the finest about the war, so it’s no great knock on Lowe’s to say that it doesn’t fully measure up to theirs ... Much of the book’s criticism of the Allied administration is valid, but Lowe goes too far in charging that Allied leaders missed an opportunity to fundamentally remake Naples.
Lowe’s meticulous historical sleuthing reveals disorder on a monumental scale ... Admirably, Lowe checks salacious myths against a vast range of Italian sources. He portrays the liberated city not as some grotesque pageant of vice but the stage for innumerable human dramas of heroism or compromise ... Rigorous, but humane and colourful.
While Lowe chronicles the symptoms of Naples’ humiliation in anguished detail, his attribution of their fundamental causes is questionable ... The title of Lowe’s book is a nod to—perhaps a shy at—Naples ’44, Norman Lewis’s celebrated and spellbinding memoir of his time there. Well-intentioned, sober, a bit tortuous in its construction, Naples 1944 is a Starmeresque corrective to the liberties that Lewis took for the sake of art. Yet it lacks his verve and intimacy. Sometimes what you do want is a little wine and song.
It isn’t clear why Lowe feels such a burning need to dig deeper. For much of the first part of this long book, he appears reluctant to spell out where he’s coming from ... His mission, it emerges, is to brand the Allies as guilty ... These days, of course, it’s fashionable to denigrate dead white men and all their works, especially in America and Britain. But to blame the Allies, who sacrificed so much blood and money to liberate Italy and Europe, for such a litany of tragedy? Frankly, it’s surreal ... The evidence he supplies, however, is underwhelming ... His case is also hampered by the inherent weakness of all such 'if Cleopatra’s nose had been shorter' versions of history. You can neither prove nor disprove them ... Where Lewis reports, Lowe preaches ... It’s all very well saying, as Lowe does, that the Allies should have purged the Fascists–but who could they have replaced them with?
A well-researched, meticulous account of life for the people of Naples during and immediately after the war, for readers interested in Italian and World War II history.
