Content area
Full Text
Garibaldi: Citizen of the World. A Biography. By Alfonso Scirocco. Translated by Allan Cameron. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007. Pp. xii, 442. $35.00.
In his introduction, Alfonso Scirocco states that Giuseppe Garibaldi's life, "so rich in extraordinary enterprises in the Americas and Europe, reads like an adventure novel with its typical love of the exotic" (p. ix). This characterization, along with his subtitle, permeates the book. Readers associate Garibaldi so closely with Italy and the Risorgimento that they forget his activity, lasting years, outside the country, especially in South America. Scirocco's book does not add anything appreciably new to what is already known about Garibaldi's life, but it is notable for its emphasis on parts of his biography that are not generally accented and because it provides the facts of an uncommon life in one convenient source more than do existing, older biographies in English.