Concise yet chaotic, Italian filmmaker and translator Nesi’s slim volume, winner of the Strega Prize, describes his experience selling his family textile business in 2004 and the effect of globalization on his beloved textile-driven city of Prato. The book takes meandering turns while bearing witness to a vanishing world. Nesi inherited his family’s business and ran it for years, at one point operating a downsized version that only broke even. Though his love for his city and former occupation is clear and moving, the book lags during its many dips into Nesi’s personal musings that seem to have little to do with the book’s subject. An otherwise gorgeous chapter on visiting his old empty weaving mill, for example, has a three-page detour into what Nesi loves about music. However, the book strengthens by end, making for a searing indictment of globalization’s failures, and the inability of politicians and pundits to consider its impact on real lives. The unrelated ruminations make for confounding reading at times, but much of the book is sad, honest, and biting; overall it is an important work. Agent: Elisabetta Sgarbi, RCS Libri. (May)
"Edoardo Nesi has written a short memoir of great charm, for all its sadness a pleasure to read… Mr. Nesi’s sense of loss will touch hearts much farther afield, wherever the West’s world-class industries have fallen to free trade and the Internet.”—The New York Times
“This unique book—part memoir, part argument for the reformation of the global financial system—tumbles out of itself on the page, and reading it was an equally propulsive experience. It rhapsodizes and slaps its chest in true Italian style, makes frequent allusions with a disarming bluntness (to Machiavelli, to Richard Ford, to Paul Newman movies), and always has something to say. I finished and instantly went back to re-read certain pages.” —John Jeremiah Sullivan, author of Pulphead and writer for the New York Times Magazine
“Who would have thought that memoir and polemic could work together so well? A totally absorbing story, and a portrait of modern Italy.” —Sarah Bakewell, author of How to Live
"A searing indictment of globalization’s failures, and the inability of politicians and pundits to consider its impact on real lives...much of the book is sad, honest, and biting; overall it is an important work." —Publishers Weekly
"We all know that globalization has disrupted industries around the world, but we don’t always connect disruption to the destruction of ways of life—the social fabric that globalization can rend and tear. Story of My People, by Edoardo Nesi, a polemic fueled by grief and rage at the devastating effect of globalization on the Italian textile industry, makes that connection tangible." —Strategy+Business
"At once a memoir, a requiem, and a work of social and literary criticism about the toll this shift took on his city and psyche...fiercely angry, conflicted, and often beautifully written." —Bookforum
“Story of My People is one of those knockout punches that literature throws at the world every now and then” —Sandro Veronesi
“Story of My People is a well-told story but also an eloquent and pained wail about loss. Globalization has swallowed up the artisans, the families and the beautiful fabrics at the heart of Prato’s weaving industry, and a world has unraveled like a skein of yarn. While Nesi clearly understands the economics and even the inevitability of this transition for Italy’s family manufacturers, he will not let this world disappear without describing it for the rest of us. A business and family can do everything right and still have everything go wrong. This is an important, poetic, and personal work of industrial history.” —Pietra Rivoli, author of The Travels of a T-shirt in the Global Economy
“A remarkable evocation of the vanished world of artisan capitalism in Tuscany, swept away by hurricane globalization. ‘Why should this destruction be?’ asks the author and former owner of a small family textile business, in a mingled cry of pain and anger.” —Robert Skidelsky, author of How Much is Enough?: Money and the Good Life
“Nesi is one of the few writers that have succeeded in depicting the dark underbelly of globalism.” —Luciano Lanna, Secolo d’Italia
“A beautiful and touching book … Whether or not you agree with its message, it has one undeniable virtue: it makes you think.” —Giorgio Marabini, Sabato Sera
“Story of My People is a transcendent song, both epic and lyrical, on industrial and human labor.” —Antonio Pennacchi
“Do you know what I would do if I became leader of the Democratic Party? I would take this courageous book and turn it into a chapter of my political project. Story of My People is about the love of a people for its roots, a community for its land, and a city for its industry.” —Massimo Giannini
"A tour de force that spares no one."—Kirkus
"...few have produced an account of globalization’s effects as personal, poignant, and beautifully written as Edoardo Nesi’s Story of My People."—New York Journal of Books
"...thought provoking and beautifully written, and also heartbreaking..."—Hudson Valley News
"...now we have another classic by someone on the wrong end of history..."
—Finance & Development
"The story of Prato's demise is lyrically written and deeply moving."—Finance & Development
"...an eloquent, emotion-laden, and, I think, essential addition to the globalization bookshelf....If I was a publisher, this is a book I’d be proud to put out."
—Strategy+Business
"From the 1950s to the 1980s, much of Italy was a charmed place, its beauty wreathed in wealth. Edoardo Nesi’s gracefully nostalgic memoir, Story of My People, is of that time…You feel saddened for the narrator and his family, and what they have lost. You feel saddened with him too, as you recognise in yourself something of the same regret for a world – not just an Italian one – that is passing. The fact that this regret is thickly gilded with sentiment makes it no less poignant. Edoardo Nesi has mined his own memories, and thus touches ours...”—The Financial Times
"The brilliance of this depressing story (winner of Italy’s Strega Prize) is Edoardo Nesi’s imaginative fusion of history and autobiography, infused with vignettes of the lives of individual workers who have suffered. Yes, this is also the author’s account of how he became a successful writer. But most of all it is the depiction of an era that is just about over, at the end of its collapse."—Counterpunch
“...an eloquent, angry, exquisitely written little book. A combination of memoir and cultural commentary.”—Emily St. John Mandel, author of The Lola Quartet and Last Night in Montreal
"Story of My People is an angry, eloquent, and beautifully written book..."—The Millions
"[Story of My People] has the driving force of a polemic but the wisdom of a novel, and is the only book about the global recession I’d recommend to anybody, though you need have no interest in the economy to pick it up. It is one of the best books I’ve read all year without question."—Library Reads
"...Nesi forms a sharp and timely indictment of runaway globalization, fast fashion, and big business."—Blouin Artinfo
"[Nesi's] heartbreaking narrative describes a struggling country that is just as fascinating and rich as the Italy advertised through the tourism industry, and much more real." —Triquarterly
"[T]he single best book about globalization…in long time. [Story of my People] takes the abstract implications of globalization and reduces it to a very personal level." —Publishing Perspectives
[A]n unfamiliar mix of memoir and the politics of business...worth reading for anyone who likes good writing and wants a deeper understanding of either contemporary Europe or global business. —Book News
In this 2011 Strata award-winning book, a retrospective blended with social criticism, Italian filmmaker and translator Nesi (I Lie for a Living) poetically describes the effects of globalization on Italy's declining economy. Responding to his family's factory going out of business in Prato, Tuscany, Nesi focuses on the ramifications of China joining the World Trade Organiztion (WTO) in the 1990s and how this resulted in cheaper labor and raw materials, forcing many of the factories in the Italian textile industry to fold. Nesi's account speaks to personal loss but also to the impacts on his community. VERDICT Industry changes aren't unique to Italy—this rich narrative should appeal to economists and social scientists researching globalization, specifically the consequences of China joining the WTO.—Meghan Dowell, New York
Novelist and translator Nesi's lament for the passing of the way of life that helped Italy recover from the legacy of fascism, now available in English. The book won the 2011 Strega Prize, the most prestigious literary award in Italy. Along with his brothers, the author was meant to be the third generation to lead his family's textile weaving company, founded in Prato, Italy, by his grandfather in 1920. Instead, he became the one who had to sell the company in 2004, an act that marked the conclusion of a way of life. Nesi tells the story of the rise and fall of his family's business as part of the small-business world that supplied beautifully made parts and materials for the producers of consumer and capital goods throughout Europe. The author demonstrates a rich literary verve and a novelist's passion, as literary and cinematographic references work their way into his unfolding lament. His descriptions of the materials and manufacture of the cloth--"yarn-dyed, with a KD finish, rendering its pile unalterable and capable of withstanding the assault of Germany's acid rains and morning frosts"--and designers like Sergio Carpini, "who felt he had the right to perform alchemy with fabrics," help carry the story. Nesi shows how box-store price cutting and government tax policy combined to prevent businesses from making profits and instead created "the latest and most peculiar of the Prato businessman: the non-profit entrepreneur." The author mocks economist promoters of globalization as "sorcerers and wizards and haruspices"; their predictions were wrong, and the empty mills and silent businesses of what had been part of Italy's once-thriving economy show the results. A tour de force that spares no one.
