[In the following favorable review, Paulding applauds the compassionate and evocative portrayal of the peasants of Gagliano found in Christ Stopped at Eboli.]

When the Italians set forth to conquer the world, starting with Ethiopia, they attended to one little detail by requesting Carlo Levi to live very quietly until further notice within the limits of a village called Gagliano, which is in the province of Lucania, a miserably sad, malarial and abandoned region just north of the Gulf of Taranto. It is just north of Calabria which is abandoned also. Carlo Levi lived in Gagliano for a year or so, and in this book [Christ Stopped at Eboli] writes about what he saw, what he heard, what the peasants told him, what he thought.

He thought and the peasants thought that Christ, that Christianity, that any hope, any possibility or reason for hope, had never come nearer to Gagliano than the town of Eboli—a railroad station on the main line, an outpost of Neapolitan civilization, many miles to the north. “We're not Christians,” the peasants told him, “we're not human beings, we're not thought of as men but simply as beasts, beasts of burden, or even less than beasts, mere creatures of the wild.”

No one ever goes to Lucania—not to stay there. The Romans came with their State and their Religion, but there were more interesting parts to govern, and the peasants looked at them and then were left alone; the Franks came with a feudal society; they failed and departed; the Kingdom of Naples came and left; then the new Italian State, then Fascism. In this war Montgomery came up the coast to join with the Americans below Salerno; the Germans were in Eboli and it was from Eboli that they launched their attack against our beachhead—not from Gagliano or from Lucania; Lucania was still by-passed even by destruction.

So that the peasants have remained always alone, subject, in their poverty, to poverty-stricken land-owners, subject to the delegates of the State, of any state, the tax collectors of all the states that have come one after another.

Carlo Levi is a sensitive man, a doctor and a painter; he has written a beautiful and human book, looking at this immeasurable distress and putting down the reasons for it. Although after his medical studies he had not practiced, it was quite impossible for him to escape the pressing appeal of the Gagliano peasants for help, and so he did what he could until the fascists stopped him—and that too was a way for him to know these people who trusted him. They were open to anyone who would help—but no one had ever helped them, and so habitually they were remote and silent. At dawn the men go down the steep hill from the village to the barren fields; at nightfall they return for short rest and brief oblivion; obstinately they manage to live. For a short moment in their lives the children manage to play—some of them.

You would think that the peasants of Gagliano would be less than men after so many centuries of suffering; eternally in the presence of poverty and death they are what we are all of us—who have forgotten in our safety what it is like to be alone, uncomforted, on earth. Carlo Levi loved these men and women and it is possible in reading his extraordinary and eloquent account to forget the dismal horror of their lives; it is possible to think of them as symbols of man's state, at its simplest, unredeemed. But that they should be living as they live, a long day's motor drive from the capital of Christendom, is surely one of the most flagrant challenges to our trust in Christian solidarity.