David Cole writes:

Until the detention of ‘enemy combatants’ at Guantánamo Bay, few legal disputes in the United States had provoked such impassioned international criticism as the 1921 conviction and 1927 execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian immigrants found guilty of robbing and murdering a factory paymaster and a security guard in broad daylight in South Braintree, Massachusetts . . . Most historians, lawyers and journalists who have studied the case have tried to determine whether Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty or innocent – a matter that can never be finally resolved. In The Sacco-Vanzetti Affair, Moshik Temkin takes a different approach, focusing instead on the political dynamics that transformed a domestic murder case into an international controversy. ‘Sacco-Vanzetti scholarship (and public discussion) of the past five decades’ has, he writes, been obsessed ‘with the question of one or both men’s guilt or innocence . . . at the expense of the social, political, intellectual and global context and ramifications of their case’.

(LRB 22 October 2009)

Yale | hardback 316 pp. |ISBN: 9780300124842