SOURCE: Rugoff, Milton. “Powerful Pictures of Sicily's Peasants.” New York Herald Tribune Book Review (7 September 1958): 3.

In the following review, Rugoff commends Levi's portrayal of the Sicilian people in Words Are Stones.

Having interpreted southern Italy with extraordinary understanding in Christ Stopped at Eboli, it is not surprising that Carlo Levi should now turn to Sicily. Not that this small collection of reports and impressions is comparable to the earlier book. And yet at its best it displays the same remarkable capacity to see a people with all their past upon them—from the eras of Greek and Saracen, through generations of feudal lords, down to the Mafia-and-landowner rule of today—victim of a hundred wilful masters.

Perhaps that is why he opens his book with a piece about the return of Vincent Impellitteri—onetime Mayor of New York—to his native town of Isnello. Impellitteri embodied for the...