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The Woman Who Shot Mussolini (2010)

by Frances Stonor Saunders(Favorite Author)

3.27 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

0805091211 (ISBN13: 9780805091212)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Metropolitan Books

review 1: This was a fantastic look at a range of characters, and also at political trends and movements. It begins with wouldbe assassin Violet Gibson's Anglo-Irish ascendancy background, and the rifts that old and new allegiances caused between members of her family. They seemed like people in search of something, anything - hence one brother's love of all things Irish, including the language and a strange costume highlighted by an orange kilt, which he always wore, despite never living in Ireland; her mother was also drawn to the blatant fakeness of Christian Science. Violet herself outraged all of them by becoming a Catholic. She seemed to have fixed on killing Mussolini for a long time, though it was a wish that was gestating in her, and not a plan, as such. Mussolini's own bac... morekground is also shown in detail. He was not simply the pompous buffoon portrayed somewhat lazily by commentators. There was much more - and much worse - to him than that. He was also a man in search of something to cling to. His fascism was made up on the spot and was therefore devoid of any solid policy, his friendships were made very unwisely and the disastrous empire-building decisions he took were based on an illusion of his, and his rather backward country's, supposed greatness. You almost feel sorry for the hapless Mussolini as the book goes on; stuck with the dreadful fallout of all those bad friendships and decisions. Not that sorry, though. Violet Gibson came very close to putting the dictator out of the misery to come when she joined a fawning crowd one morning in Rome and took a pot shot at him that struck him on the nose. Mussolini made much of his seeming invincibility, and the fact that he was almost unembarrassable, and within a day he had resumed his duties, including a state visit, with a bandage covering much of his face. What happened to Violet after her arrest takes up the second half of this book, and I don't want to spoil that in a review, so I'll just say that she was very shamefully treated, even after it was decided that it was possibly crazier NOT to shoot Europe's dictators, and long after an Italian partisan group had finished what Violet started, and put an end to Mussolini.
review 2: Good account of a blip in history I had never heard anything about. In 1926 Violet Gibson gets close enough to take a shot at Mussolini and got a part of his nose. If her gun had not jammed history would have been markedly changed. Good effort to put the reader in the context of the times. A number of famous people are included - again as an effort to give the reader that feel for the times. I thought it was a little long. Covers the backgrounds of both major characters (she a lady of Irish upper class and he a youth from poor background). Shows Mussolini's lack of real commitment to any real political view simply wanted power. And it is never known whether Violet Gibson - in the throes of religious fervor - tries to assassinate Il Duce or was she part of a conspiracy. Either way she spent the rest of her long life in an asylum. less

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