Thursday, November 28, 2019

Caroline Moorehead

Caroline Moorehead is the New York Times bestselling author of Village of Secrets: Defying the Nazis in Vichy France; A Train in Winter: An Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship, and Resistance in Occupied France; and Human Cargo: A Journey Among Refugees, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. An acclaimed biographer, Moorehead has also written for the New York Review of Books, the Guardian, the Times, and the Independent. She lives in London and Italy.

Moorehead's new book is A House in the Mountains: The Women Who Liberated Italy from Fascism.

From her interview with Anita Sethi for the Guardian:

You have written three other books about the resistance. Where did your interest come from?

It stems from my interest in human rights. I’ve always been fascinated by courage and how people survive seemingly unsurvivable situations. What I found were these extraordinary people – who were actually ordinary people – who got up in the morning and thought: “No, I’m not going to put up with this any more.”

Tell me about the women in the book.

I discovered, to my surprise, that everyone thinks the Italians had no resistance. There were actually 600,000 who joined the resistance; of those, 70,000 were women. Under Mussolini, they were third-class citizens, had no rights, no voice, no equality. It was the women who were the first to...[read on]
--Marshal Zeringue