by George De Stefano

Roberto M. Dainotto's The Mafia: A Cultural History offers something unique in the somewhat overcrowded category of books about the Mafia and its pop culture representations: a Sicilian intellectual's historically informed yet personal perspective on the enduring appeal of organized crime stories.

Dainotto is a professor of Romance Studies and Literature at Duke University whose previous book, Europe (In Theory), deftly used postcolonial and subaltern theory to deconstruct Eurocentrism from within Europe itself, demonstrating how theories of an advanced North and a retrograde South continue to influence contemporary understandings of culture, politics, and national identity.

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Source: http://www.popmatters.com/