Volume 36, Number 10 · June 15, 1989
Who Killed Carlo Tresca?
By Daniel Aaron
All the Right Enemies: The Life and Murder of Carlo Tresca
by Dorothy Gallagher
Rutgers University Press, 321 pp., $24.95
If Verdi were to reappear today he might well find in Dorothy Gallagher's book on Carlo Tresca material for an admirable libretto. Indeed opera is perhaps the medium best-suited to capture Tresca's majesty and bravura: an impetuous and brave revolutionary, touched with nobility and venial weaknesses, and ripe for catastrophe, he played out his life in a setting of crowds, secret meetings, killings, kidnappings, trials, and confrontations. Dorothy Gallagher's own cool, almost laconic, recital of his flamboyant career, immensely interesting and cunningly framed as it is, is anything but operatic; in fact, it reads like an inspired police report. Yet her restraint serves to enhance the violence and passion of the events she recounts.
Review, 3520 words
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