December 12, 1969 the highpoint of Italy's "Hot Autumn" the country is rocked by strikes, demonstrations and an insurgent extra-parliamentary left. A bomb explodes in the Agricultural Bank in Milan: sixteen people are killed.

Anarchist railwayman Giuseppe Pinelli is taken in for questioning by the police. Three days later, Pinelli (later immortalised in Dario Fo's play The Accidental Death of an Anarchist) plummets to his death from the window of police commissioner Luigi Calabresi's office. The police claim suicide, the left accuses them of murder.

May 17, 1972 Luigi Calabresi is killed with two revolver shots in front of his home. Lotta Continua, the far-left paper, applauds this act of proletarian justice. Right-wing extremists are suspected but no one is convicted.

July 19, 1988 Leonardo Marino, ex-Fiat worker, former armed robber and member of Lotta Continua, gives himself up to the police, claiming responsibility for the murder of Calabresi. Then starts a judicial enquiry in which Marino implicates the leadership of Lotta Continua, including Adriano Sofri, Ovidio Bompressi and Giorgio Piotresetafani, in the affair. Taking its revenge for humiliation in the 1960s, the Italian state imprisons the leftists and drags them through a series of dubious court cases.

In The Judge and the Historian, the historian Carlo Ginzburg draws on his work on witchcraft trials in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to dissect the weaknesses and contradictions of the state's case in this late-twentieth-century political show-trial. Carefully exposing the twists and turns of the various trials, Ginzburg also takes the opportunity to reflect more generally on the similarities and differences between the roles of the historian and the judge. Standing in the tradition of Emile Zola's famous J'accuse polemic against the Dreyfus trial at the end of the last century, Ginzburg's book demonstrates the continuing potency of intellectual rigour and passion against political opportunism and dishonesty at the end of this century.

Carlo Ginzburg was born in Turin and now teaches history at UCLA. His other books in English include Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath and Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.


What Amazon.com says:

The importance of some books cannot be understated: They help place ourselves in the world, ask the right questions, and maintain useful, strategic credulity in the face of brutal empiricism. Sometimes they shed light on those facts, contextualise them, interrogate them, and so hold them up as empty, mendacious, vicious. The Judge and the Historian does this. As well as a concise and persuasive meditation on the convergence and divergence of the roles of its eponymous professionals, the book offers us a path through the tortuous proceedings that led to what the author portrays as a dreadful miscarriage of justice in a modern European state.

Italy has always had a particularly active political Left and in the late '60s and early '70s an extraparliamentary faction that descended into propagandist violence. In the so-called Hot Autumn of 1969, a bomb exploded in the Agricultural Bank in Milan, killing 16 people. An anarchist railway man, Giuseppe Pinelli, was taken in for questioning by the police. Three days later, Pinelli (immortalised in Dario Fo's play The Accidental Death of an Anarchist) fell to his death from the window of the police commissioner Luigi Calabresi's office. The police claimed suicide but the Left accused them of murder. In 1972 Calabresi was shot dead in front of his home. The far-left Lotta Continua claimed it was an act of proletarian justice but many think right-wing extremists were involved. After almost 16 years of silence, an ex-militant of Lotta, riven with guilt, gave himself up, claiming responsibility for the murder. Leonardo Marino then implicated the leadership of Lotta in the affair.

Carlo Ginzburg, a noted and respected historian, draws on his work on witchcraft trials in the 16th and 17th centuries to dissect the state's case in this late-20th-century show trial. He has written a provocative and passionate book that casts a detailed look at the facts of the case, facts that when presented here cast serious doubt on the judgments reached in Italy early in 1999. Justice is inevitably contextual, and we should consider ourselves lucky to have someone as skilled as Ginzburg in deconstructing its various questionable manifestations. © Amazon.com

Women in the United States live about seven years longer than men. More than half of U.S. expenditures for health are attributed to the care of women. "What, then, is the problem with women's health care?" I am often asked. There are two answers to this question. First, we are seeing sharp rises in some serious health problems among women. For example, over the last two decades, the cancer death rates have risen twice as much for women as for men (6 percent versus 3 percent) (Brody 1995). Second, it is true that women live longer on average, but they spend most of those extra years in a state of disability and dependency as a result of myriad chronic, degenerative illnesses that befall them in older age. Although the absolute life expectancy for women has increased, the "active life expectancy" has actually decreased.

I am not questioning the absolute amount of money spent on women's health in this country, but rather the way in which this money has been spent. Recent evidence suggests that some of the diseases that have decreased women's active life expectancy may be preventable, or detectable early enough to improve their outcomes. Yet relatively little money has gone toward such prevention and detection. The costs attributed to women's health are largely for institutional care and terminal hospital care in the last years of life, for medications, and for time lost from participation in the paid labour force as a result of illness. Very little of this money has gone to research that might ultimately make the current level of these expenditures unnecessary. In fact, in 1988 only 13 percent of the budget of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) went for research on women's health (Kirschstein 1991), although women contribute as many of their tax dollars as men to support this federal research body.

This discrepancy between research on men's and women's health problems has recently been publicised. The heroic efforts of Rep. Pat Schroeder and others have led to the creation of an Office of Women's Health Research at the NIH, a ruling that all NIH research include women when appropriate, and legislation that appropriated additional money to the NIH for research on breast cancer, ovarian cancer, osteoporosis, and heart disease. Together, these efforts are known as the Women's Health Initiative. These are clearly steps in the right direction, but mere drops in the bucket in terms of the magnitude of the problem.

Significantly, except for heart disease, the conditions to be addressed by the Women's Health Initiative are all related to the reproductive status of women. Although these problems are vitally important, the disproportionate emphasis on them is a reflection of the way in which women have traditionally been viewed by the medical profession. Recent evidence reminds us that women are not merely "walking wombs" but are subject to a wide range of medical problems in addition to those associated with their gynaecologic systems. The three leading causes of death in all women are the same as those for men: heart disease, cancer, and stroke. For example, last year in the United States, ten thousand more women died of lung cancer than of breast cancer. That is not to suggest that research on breast cancer and programs for its early detection be abandoned. Quite to the contrary, these efforts are critically important and demand more attention and resources. But we also need more investigation of the realities of the full range of women's health problems, more research into their prevention and early detection, a better understanding of the relationship between women's changing roles in our society and their health status, and re-education of today's doctors to broaden their view and better prepare them to meet the full spectrum of health needs of women.

These challenges require additional expenditures of health dollars for research, medical education and training, and public education directed at the health problems of women. Only after all this is achieved will we really know how many years of women's lives have heretofore been lost or wasted because of their unrecognised or ignored health problems and how many of our country's health dollars have been misspent in the name of improving women's lives.