A review by jpowerj
Selections from the Prison Notebooks by Antonio Gramsci

3.0

It's another one of those books that's very weird to "review", since it's such a classic and was so influential that it's hard to separate these writings from their cultural context. But anyways, my 3 star choice here is just because I don't really think this particular volume does a good job of presenting and/or explaining Gramsci's thought. What I mean is, I found myself very confused and with very little explanation throughout the book, since the (extremely long) introduction and almost all of the footnotes give the most minute details of Italian politics from 1850-1930, without (IMO) actually explaining the _content_ of the writings. So in the end, what I got from this volume was more a set of biographies of various people and parties in Italy since 1850 instead of an exegesis of Gramsci's thought. Maybe in the end the best thing for me would just be a book _about_ Gramsci's thought rather than a presentation of primary sources... so perhaps I'm being unfair with this one ¯\_(ツ)_/¯