Edoardo Nesi is Italy's upper crust; heir to a firm in the fine textile industry, he reports a life of luxury with an utter lack of self-consciousness. He admires Machiavelli, and writes with more romantic affection for his factory than for the men who worked there. All this makes him an unlikely candidate for an impassioned manifesto against unbridled global capitalism. But this is what the book is. It is valuable precisely because of its source. To most U.S. readers it will be an unusual book; the figure of a business magnate who is also a famous novelist and translator is not such a unicorn in Italy. The book is written with a literary richness of language and a deep love of culture, and much of it is structured as memoir. Readers come to understand Nesi is as precisely a product of his region as a good wine--and so is the fine cloth his factory made, the system that made it available as warm and durable coats, and the thousands of people that industry supported. He paints a picture of a region built on skilled craft, local industry, trade, and not a little noblesse oblige. Since the passage of globalization trade laws, almost all of it is gone. The ghost of F. Scott Fitzgerald hovers over the book. The author sold out early; his own fortune is safe. But his men are unemployed, his CEO friends are becoming the Third World, his city grows desperate, and his factory is bought by fly-by-night Chinese entrepreneurs, who use it as a squatter camp for imported slave labor until they are shut down by police for violating basic labor and safety laws. Nesi creates an unfamiliar mix of memoir and the politics of business. But in one breathtaking scene he makes clear the alternative to thinking personally about trade policy is the racial hate that fueled two world wars. The message is equally applicable in the U.S. In the end, uncomfortably, self-consciously, Nesi takes hold of the banner of protest. The book won Italy's Strega Prize for literature. It is ably but quietly translated by Anthony Shugaar. Worth reading for anyone who likes good writing and wants a deeper understanding of either contemporary Europe or global business. Annotation ©2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com) Read Less