Comrades and Christians: Religion and Political Struggle in Communist Italy

An American anthropologist spent 1971-72 in a working-class district of Bologna and now presents his informative findings, emphasizing inter alia the anti-communist crusade of the Church and the Christian Democrats. In deliberate contrast to earlier accounts of communism as pathology, he presents a rather benign view of the local communists and sets their success in the context of Italian society. A pleasant work, but slight and somewhat dated.