Gandhi of Sicily
McNeil, Gelston
Gandhi of Sicily Report from Palermo, by Danilo Dolci. Orion Press. 310 pp. $4. Reviewed by Gelston McNeil Probably few Americans realize the incredible poverty and human degradation that exists...
...The Gandhi-like tactics of Danilo Dolci in his "campaign for full employment" have led many people in northern Italy, and in Sweden, England, and several other countries to form committees to support his work...
...Local terms are explained as they occur...
...Conditions described in Report from Palermo constitute a formidable challenge to the power of love to redeem people...
...It remains for another of Dolci's books to be translated describing the constructive, on-going effort to ferret out the causes and lead an awakened people to find the cures...
...No one can read such a vivid portrayal of human misery without raising the question, "What can be done about it...
...He points out, "It is only by making the best of both worlds—the world of the head no less than the world of the heart—that the Twentieth Century saint can hope to be effective...
...In Report from Palermo, Dolci is the researcher who lets the Sicilian poor whom he has interviewed in the city and countryside around Palermo picture the raw conditions of their life in their own coarse but colorful and revealing words—words that are shocking to the sensibilities of "civilized" persons even in these days of preparation for mass murder through germs and atoms...
...The style is simple and direct, in an able translation...
...Some rooms have no windows, or a single small window looking out on a heap of human excrement on the railroad tracks...
...Danilo Dolci is one of these modern Franciscans-with-a-degree" who is employing research and planning as well as great love and sacrifice...
...Still fewer know of the efforts of Danilo Dolci to inspire these people with new hope and vision and to lead them in building a better life for themselves and their children...
...This is the challenge that Dolci and his friends have taken up...
...The amazing fact is that so many of the people still hold to ideals of honesty and decency...
...Reviewed by Gelston McNeil Probably few Americans realize the incredible poverty and human degradation that exists in southern Italy...
...Many are given to banditry or prostitution as a means of survival in the moral jungle in which they live...
...Aldous Huxley, in his introduction to Report from Palermo, gives us a brief glimpse of this man and his deep love of his fellowmen...
...Often there are more than four persons per sleeping place...
...Men frequently see jobs that are closed to them go to their small children, who labor up to twelve hours a day under hazardous conditions at pitifully low pay...
...When Dolci visited Sicily to study remains of beautiful temples of ancient civilizations, he was so touched by the incredible destitution he found among the masses that he gave up prospects for a successful career and an assured income in the north as an architect to live and work among the poor...
...Unemployment is the central problem of Sicily, and it is on this that Dolci is centering his attention...
...A similar group in Canada and the United States is just starting a "Crusade Against Poverty" (26A Devereux Street, Utica 2, N. Y...
...From the pages of this book emerges a heart-rending picture of disease, squalor, illiteracy, hunger, and social injustice...
...Some people have no shelter at all...
...Official figures show 2,100,000 persons (47.1 per cent of Sicily's total population) destitute...
...Many of Dolci's "witnesses" are ignorant and hence susceptible to the most fantastic superstitions...
...In one slum area visited, twenty-eight homes house thirty-six families, numbering one hundred and forty-four persons, in thirty rooms...
Vol. 24 • September 1960 • No. 9
