Carlo Rosselli (1899-1937) was one of the most charismatic and influential of European antifascist intellectuals. Born into a wealthy Jewish family, and abandoning a promising career as a professor of political economics, he devoted his considerable fortune and ultimately his life to the struggle against fascism. In 1925, he was instrumental in establishing the first underground antifascist newspaper. While imprisoned for his subversive political activities, he wrote his magnum opus, Liberal Socialism , arguing that socialism was the logical development of the principle of liberty. After a daring escape, he made his way to Paris and became the driving force behind a new political movement, "Justice and Liberty." Rosselli was among the first to arrive in Barcelona after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, in which he commanded an armed column of volunteers in defense of the Republic. When Italian fascists discovered Rosselli's plot to assassinate Mussolini, they declared him the regime's most dangerous enemy and had him murdered, along with his brother, noted historian Nello Rosselli, on a country road in Normandy. In this work, the first biography of Rosselli in English, Stanislao Pugliese skillfully interweaves the strands of heresy, exile, and tragedy in Rosselli's life. The drama and drive of his narrative enhance the scholarly contribution that this work makes to modern Italian history and to the study of European antifascism. Pugliese's is the first English-language biography of this charismatic leader of the Italian antifascist movement. Born into a wealthy Jewish family in Rome in 1899, Rosselli was an ardent nationalist before World War I. After the war, he became involved with the Socialist movement and developed his own ideas of a "humanitarian socialism"Aa socialism that took the individual into account. Jailed for his subversive political activities, he escaped and went into exile in France. At the outbreak of the Civil War in Spain, he went to Barcelona to command an armed corps of volunteers. Eventually, the Italian government declared him an enemy of the regime and had him murdered. Drawing from letters and archives, Pugliese (history, Hofstra) reconstructs this important life capably. Recommended for academic collections with an interest in Italian history or a history of the Socialist movement.ARoseanne Castellino, Arthur D. Little, Cambridge, MA Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. A scholarly biography of the prominent Italian antifascist intellectual, writer, and activist who was stabbed to death by political assassins in 1937. As many as 200,000 people attended the funeral services for Rosselli in Paris. But today, as Pugliese notes, Rosselli (a ``prophet crying out in the wilderness'') is so little known outside his native land that this is the first biography of him in English. Pugliese (history/Hofstra Univ.) brings to this admiring portrait a formidable variety of tools, including a thorough knowledge of Italian history, language, literature, and landscape. After a brief introduction, the book proceeds chronologically from Rosselli's birth in 1899 (his father was a musicologist; his mother a playwright); follows him as he studies, marries, becomes a professor of political economy at Bocconi University in Milan; describes and assesses his increasing hatred for Mussolini's fascist government; and details his associations with fellow political radicals, his arrests and imprisonment, his increasing involvements in antifascist organizations and publications, and his exile to France. Most engaging for general readers will be Pugliese's accounts of Rosselli's activism: his fistfight with a pack of fascists in the streets of Milan, his motorboat escape from the island prison of Lipari, his battlefield exploits during the Spanish Civil War, his participation in various attempts to assassinate Mussolini, and his 1934 meeting with Trotsky (who ``appeared conservative'' to Rosselli). Pugliese's primary focus, however, is on Rosselli's intellectual evolution, and though social historians may delight in his many detailed exegeses of Rosselli's writings as he endeavors to establish his hero's place in intellectual history, the uninitiate may be bemused, if not baffled, to read, in a fairly typical passage, that Rosselli was ``ideologically positioned (not trapped) between Antonio Gramsci and Piero Gobetti.'' Pugliese's research is impeccable, though this important work at times demands of nonspecialist readers an uncommon erudition. (14 halftones, 1 line illustration, not seen) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. “Carlo Rosselli--one of the most courageous and interesting figures of Italian antifascism--is a rich and overdue subject for a biography...Pugliese has chosen to write a primarily intellectual biography and has done a commendable job of explaining Rosselli's maverick position within European Socialism.” ― Alexander Stille , New York Times Boo