SOURCE: Secondari, John H. “Golden Coast and Barren Interior.” Saturday Review 41, no. 36 (6 September 1958): 35.

In the following review, Secondari comments on Levi's distance from his subject matter and the lack of facts in Words Are Stones.

As a prophet is least attended in his own home, Carlo Levi is less thought of in Italy than abroad. Certainly much less in Italy than in the United States, where his reputation rests solidly on the impact and success of his wartime Christ Stopped at Eboli. That was possibly the first book to pull back the curtain from the tragic, desert-like, dusty world of the Southern Italian peasant, and allow a foreign audience to peek. It was only after the war that the Italian Communists made the conditions of the Southern Italian peasant and land reform twin subjects generally familiar to the world at large.

Words Are Stones deals with that same...