Garibaldi : Father of Modern Italy

by Marcia Davenport, Stuyvesant Van Veen (Illustrator)

"Marcia Davenport tells vividly of the desperate struggle of years of guerilla warfare, the relentless determination of a leader dedicated to the cause of freedom, and the adoration of a grateful people."

184 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1957

About the author

American author and music critic. She was born Marcia Glick, daughter of Bernard Glick and opera singer Alma Gluck, later stepdaughter of violinist Efrem Zimbalist when Alma Gluck remarried.

Davenport traveled extensively with her parents and was educated intermittently at the Friends School in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and the Shipley School at Bryn Mawr. She began at Wellesley College but eloped to Pittsburgh in 1923 to marry Fred D. Clarke. Eventually she earned her B.A. at the University of Grenoble. Her first child was born in 1924, but in 1925 she divorced Clarke.

She took an advertising copywriting job to support herself and her daughter. In 1928 she began at the editorial staff of The New Yorker, where she worked until 1931. In 1929, she married Russell Davenport, who soon after became editor of Fortune. Davenport's second daughter was born in 1934. That same year she began as the music critic of Stage magazine.

Davenport had close ties through her mother and stepfather to the classical music world and particularly to the heady opera world of Europe and America in the first half of the 20th century. She was first celebrated as a writer for her first book, Mozart, the first published American biography of composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Her marriage to Russell Davenport ended in 1944.

She also wrote several popular novels, notably The Valley of Decision, a 1940s bestseller made into a successful movie with Greer Garson and Gregory Peck.

Reviews

[Bibliobites Veronica]

I knew absolutely nothing about Garibaldi before reading this book and very little about European politics at the time (during the American Civil War) so this was a great way to learn some without getting bogged down in tons of detail. Sometimes I assign these to fill in or round out my high schooler’s readings too, even though they’re written at a middle grade level, and this may be one of them, as an Important People of the Nineteenth Century title.

[Cherisa B · Rating 3 out of 5]

A middle school level bio of the hero of Italian unification. A hagiography yes but packed with information easy to consume about the situational context in the Italian peninsula before and during the Risorgimento. Simplistic but you get main political players as well packed into less than 200 pages. Good overview to start if you want to know about unification from a bird’s eye view.

I was interested to learn that in exile from an early rebellion in the Piedmont, Little Joe went to South America and settled in Uruguay awhile, helping rebels against the Spaniards and Portuguese. His Brazilian wife Anita is an Italian heroine.

[Marian · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book thoroughly. It was short and although it painted Garibaldi as a faultless, perfect hero, it was interesting to learn about his history.