Alexander Stille (born 1 January 1957 in New York City) is an American author and journalist.
Early life and education
He is the son of Elizabeth and Michael U. Stille. Michael was a Russian-born journalist who was the longtime American correspondent and later chief editor of Milan's Corriere della Sera newspaper. Alexander graduated from Yale and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
Career
Works
He has written several books and numerous articles about Italy--on subjects including its history, culture, politics, and the legacy of the Mafia--and his writing has appeared in publications including the New York Times, La Repubblica, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic Monthly, the New Republic, Correspondent, U.S. News & World Report, the Boston Globe, and the Toronto Globe and Mail. The author of six books, Stille's most recent is The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune, which will be released in June 2023.
Stille's first book, Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families Under Fascism, won the Los Angeles Times book award and was chosen by the Times Literary Supplement as one of the best books of 1992. In this work, Stille recounts the histories of several Italian families to explore the "paradoxical quality of Jewish life in fascist Italy--a highly tolerant country that suddenly embraced anti-Semitism, the chief ally of Nazi Germany, which had staunchly refused to cooperate with the deportation of Jews." He ultimately shows how the "experience of Italian Jews" during the period of fascist rule entailed "a strange mixture of benevolence and betrayal, persecution and rescue" that distinguished it from most of the rest of Europe. As Herbert Mitgang concluded in the New York Times, "The result . . . is an achievement that deserves to stand next to the most insightful fiction about life and death under Fascism."
A few years later, Stille published an examination of more recent Italian history: Excellent Cadavers: The Mafia and the Death of the First Italian Republic, an investigation into the Sicilian Mafia in the latter half of the twentieth century. It especially focuses on the events leading up to the major crackdown against the criminal organization in the 1990s following the bloodthirsty reign of Salvatore Riina and was dedicated in part to the memory of anti-mafia judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino. Calling Stille "a writer to watch," Richard Bernstein described Excellent Cadavers in the New York Times as an "absorbing, detailed history" that was "meticulously researched." The events outlined in the book were turned into two movies of the same name: a fictionalized 1999 HBO Pictures account, starring Chazz Palminteri as Falcone, and a 2005 documentary from director Marco Turco.
In 2002's The Future of the Past, Stille considered how people relate to history in a constantly evolving world. "Trying to show the double-edged nature of technological change in a series of different contexts and from a number of odd angles," he studied subjects as varied as historical monuments in Egypt, China, and Italy, environmental preservation efforts in India and Madagascar, and repositories of collective knowledge including the Vatican Library and the U.S. National Archives. An open-ended meditation on historical memory, Stille "chose to avoid arguing a particular thesis," which may explain reviewer Michiko Kakutani's evaluation of the work as "fascinating but helter-skelter," a "book in which the parts are much more interesting than the whole."