Sicily: Three Thousand Years of Human History [Hardcover]

Sandra Benjamin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 19, 2006

The rich, recorded history of Sicily reaches back for more than three thousand years. Greeks, Romans, Vandals, Goths, Byzantines, Muslims, Normans, Hohenstaufens, Spaniards, Bourbons, the Savoy Kingdom of Italy and the modern era have all held sway, and left lasting influences on the island’s culture and architecture. And yet no contemporary book tells the story of Sicily in a single volume for the general reader.
Tourists, armchair travelers, and historians will all delight in this fluid narrative that can be read straight through, dipped into over time, or used as a reference guide to each period in Sicily’s fascinating tale.
It is a general history, an account of welfare and warfare. Emigration of people from Sicily often overshadows the importance of the people who immigrated to the island through the centuries. Immigrants have included several who became Sicily’s rulers, along with Jews, Ligurians, and Albanians. All are ancestors of modern Sicilians. Sicily’s character has also been determined by what passed it by: events that affected Europe generally, namely the Crusades and Columbus’s discovery of the Americas, had remarkably little influence on Italy’s most famous island.

Maps, biographical notes, suggestions for further reading, a glossary, pronunciation keys, and much more make this book as essential as it is enjoyable.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This solid narrative of the Mediterranean island emphasizes how its location has subjected it to one wave of conquest after another. Benjamin (The World of Benjamin Tudela), who has lived in Sicily for the past decade, traces Sicilian history back to the indigenous Neolithic cultures, which dated from 7000 B.C. up through the first millennium B.C. The Greeks and the Carthaginians fought one another to exhaustion, leaving Sicily a prey to the Romans, who converted it into a rich granary of estates worked by (often rebellious) slaves. Muslims from Africa succeeded the Romans in the seventh century A.D., and they in turn gave way to Norman French, the best rulers the island ever had. From the famous rebellion of the Sicilian Vespers in 1282, Aragonese, Hapsburg and Bourbon Spaniards ruled, until Garibaldi used the island as a springboard for his unification of Italy in the 1860s. In this engaging read, Benjamin ably explains the temperament and culture of modern-day Sicilians, through the island's checkered political climate; its rugged and seismic terrain (the still-active Mt. Etna looms to the east); its poor soil and scant rainfall; as well as the mass emigration it endured in the 19th and 20th centuries. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Given its central location within the Mediterranean basin, the island of Sicily has found itself involved in just about all the major events that have shaped Europe, Africa, and Asia over three millennia. First came the Phoenicians, who had established their outpost at Carthage. They gave way to Greeks and their culture. Romans took the island as one of their first conquests on the road to hegemony. The crumbling Roman Empire left a void that first German tribes and then Arab settlers filled. Normans succeeded the Arabs and ushered in a golden age under the great king Roger. Other European colonial powers vied for dominance until Italy's eventual unification. The instability, friction, suspicion, and ethnic tumult caused by these successive waves of conquerors laid a foundation for the Mafia, whose rules of secrecy and assurances of protection worked to advantage in the island's rugged, inaccessible interior. Benjamin recounts all this history in easy prose unencumbered by academic pretension, making this an ideal history for the nonspecialist. Public libraries with significant Italian American populations will find this history in special demand. Mark Knoblauch
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 512 pages
• Publisher: Steerforth; First Edition edition (May 19, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1586421018
• ISBN-13: 978-1586421014
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,335,739 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

58 of 67 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars A Soccer Mom's Introduction To Sicily, February 22, 2007

By 

Unmoved Mover (Anywhere & Everywhere) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sicily: Three Thousand Years of Human History (Hardcover)

There are a only a handful of comprehensive works on Sicilian history, and most of them suffer the same disorder as the present work: they are far too general to provide the reader with even a casual glimpse of Sicily's rich and diverse history.

The island and its people have been frequent topics of good writers (Sciascia, Verga) and bad writers both. It seems approachable only in fragmented form: a volume or two on the Normans, a brief history of Magna Grecia, a tour through the peasant villages of the late 1800s, and the inevitable works on mafiosi. In all such cases, however, one is able to take any and all final assessments with a grain of salt. Not so in a comprehensive work, which for its part must say something "final and true" about Sicily for the sake of the book jacket and the casual reader. Such pithy truths are nearly always off the mark, and those found in this work are no exception.

The aforementioned issues, coupled with the dry writing style, makes for poor reading. One might as well pick up the DK Guide to Sicily, as it will provide you with the same depth of understanding, or lack thereof, provided in this book.

Those looking for more information about ancient Sicily might consider M.I. Finley's History of Sicily. If you'd like to understand Sicily's role in the fates of the Greco-Roman world, you might pick up Donald Kagan's History of the Peloponnesian War and Polybius' histories on the Punic wars. For those interested in the rich tapestry that is medieval Sicily (From Arab to Norman to Spanish rule), there is Norwich's The Normans In Sicily (a rather huge tome, but a great one.) And if you are simply interested in reading 19th to 20th century vignettes on Sicilian life and culture, then there are a number of novels by Sciascia, a handful of journals by Italian-American ladies who've come back to roost, and, of course, books on the Mafia disguised as books on Sicily (Norman Lewis, Peter Robb, and, in fiction, Mario Puzo.) These should tie you over.

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting but flawed, April 7, 2007

By 

James A. Maccaro "book-happy-usa" (New York, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Sicily: Three Thousand Years of Human History (Hardcover)

This book is valuable because it covers a lot of territory and has a number of strengths, but it also has many weaknesses. The author does not seem to have a firm grasp of Sicily's Greek history and, even worse, seems to be lost when it comes to the Romen period. She even says something to the effect that "nothing much happened" in Sicily during the Roman Empire once Augustus won the civil war. She also misunderstands Frederick II, Sicily's most reknowned ruler, considered to be the greatest king of the Middle Ages. She is on firmer ground when covering the periods of French and Spanish domination and the Bourbon court in Naples. Her account of the creation of modern Italy (& its incorporation of Sicily) is excellent. As for modern Sicily, she provides a good account of the Mafia and of politics, but little else. There is very little relating to cultural subjects, e.g., food, folk arts, literature. Most of the book relates to politics and to large-scale economic issues.

16 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not a bad overview, but not particularly good, September 3, 2006

By 

Andrew B. Obin "begemot2000" (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Sicily: Three Thousand Years of Human History (Hardcover)

Not a bad summary of the sicilian history but the book is poorly written. Reads like an unispired Ph. D. thesis. It is at its strongest when it deals with the early sicilian history, modern history (the last 100 years or so) is not dealt with particularly well and does not appear to be well researched.