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.
