Author makes history personal, accessible

David Kertzer, provost of Brown University, is also a professor of anthropology and Italian studies who writes accessibly about Italian history and culture — six books so far and another on the way. The man is prolific even though he is only in the middle of a five-year term as an academic administrator, which takes considerable time away from his writing.

"I have some marvelous material for my next book, 'Mussolini and the Pope,' which I'm dying to get written," said Kertzer during a phone interview from Brown University in Providence, R.I. But the book he has just finished about human rights, titled "Amalia's Tale," is an intriguing story of a young peasant woman, Amalia Bagnacavalli, who contracts syphilis from a sickly baby she is given from a foundling home.

Her life and her health in serious jeopardy, she finds a young and ambitious attorney, Augusto Barbieri, who agrees to seek legal damages on her behalf from Italian courts. Over a decade, he wins a surprising victory, but Amalia never approaches the recovery of all she has lost.

This is an unforgettable legal and social story that constantly rises and falls on various decisions that could be dull or complex were it not for the writing gift and intellectual genius Kertzer brings to this work. He makes it compelling by telling a true story about suffering, death and the unfair use of authority.

He also understands the "daunting nature of Italian law with its multilevel courts."

Kertzer refers to what he does as "microhistory," first popularized in the 1970s when historians decided to detour around their usual focus on "the elite, kings, wars, etc. and focus on real people, especially those who were illiterate," said Kertzer.

The idea he embraced is to "focus on an individual, someone who is part of an illiterate mass who became swept up in a leading issue of the time and it led to a documentary record of some kind."