Alexander Stille (born 1 January 1957 in New York City)[1] is an American author and journalist.
He is the son of Elizabeth and Michael U. Stille.[2] Michael was a Russian-born journalist who was the longtime American correspondent and later chief editor of Milan's Corriere della Sera newspaper.[3] Alexander graduated from Yale and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
He has written several books and numerous articles about Italy--on subjects including its history, culture, politics, and the legacy of the Mafia--and his writing has appeared in publications including the New York Times, La Repubblica, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic Monthly, the New Republic, Correspondent, U.S. News & World Report, the Boston Globe, and the Toronto Globe and Mail.[4] The author of six books, Stille's most recent is The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune, which will be released in June 2023.[5]
Stille's first book, Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families Under Fascism, won the Los Angeles Times book award and was chosen by the Times Literary Supplement as one of the best books of 1992. In this work, Stille recounts the histories of several Italian families to explore the "paradoxical quality of Jewish life in fascist Italy--a highly tolerant country that suddenly embraced anti-Semitism, the chief ally of Nazi Germany, which had staunchly refused to cooperate with the deportation of Jews."[6] He ultimately shows how the "experience of Italian Jews" during the period of fascist rule entailed "a strange mixture of benevolence and betrayal, persecution and rescue" that distinguished it from most of the rest of Europe. As Herbert Mitgang concluded in the New York Times, "The result . . . is an achievement that deserves to stand next to the most insightful fiction about life and death under Fascism."[7]
A few years later, Stille published an examination of more recent Italian history: Excellent Cadavers: The Mafia and the Death of the First Italian Republic, an investigation into the Sicilian Mafia in the latter half of the twentieth century. It especially focuses on the events leading up to the major crackdown against the criminal organization in the 1990s following the bloodthirsty reign of Salvatore Riina and was dedicated in part to the memory of anti-mafia judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino. Calling Stille "a writer to watch," Richard Bernstein described Excellent Cadavers in the New York Times as an "absorbing, detailed history" that was "meticulously researched."[8] The events outlined in the book were turned into two movies of the same name: a fictionalized 1999 HBO Pictures account, starring Chazz Palminteri as Falcone, and a 2005 documentary from director Marco Turco.
In 2002's The Future of the Past, Stille considered how people relate to history in a constantly evolving world. "Trying to show the double-edged nature of technological change in a series of different contexts and from a number of odd angles," he studied subjects as varied as historical monuments in Egypt, China, and Italy, environmental preservation efforts in India and Madagascar, and repositories of collective knowledge including the Vatican Library and the U.S. National Archives.[9] An open-ended meditation on historical memory, Stille "chose to avoid arguing a particular thesis," which may explain reviewer Michiko Kakutani's evaluation of the work as "fascinating but helter-skelter," a "book in which the parts are much more interesting than the whole."[10]
Stille revisited his first two books' focus on Italy in The Sack of Rome: How a Beautiful European Country with a Fabled History and a Storied Culture Was Taken Over by a Man Named Silvio Berlusconi (2006). In its review of this book's explication of Silvio Berlusconi's transformation from a real estate and media mogul into Italy's prime minister, Publishers Weekly praised Stille for having "exquisitely analyzed not only contemporary Italian culture but [also] the ominous rise of an international political culture in which figures such as Berlusconi can flourish."[11] This thematic focus may explain the resurgent interest in Stille's book during and after the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign; for example, MSNBC's Chris Hayes explained that he read The Sack of Rome "a few days after Trump was elected" because Stille's profile of Berlusconi suggested "the closest modern analogue" to Trump's ascendancy that he could think of.[12] Stille himself considered the comparison in a 2016 essay for the Intercept, noting that "both [Trump and Berlusconi] are billionaires who made their initial fortunes in real estate, whose wealth and playboy lifestyles turned them into celebrities" with "improbable inter-class appeal," while also exploring how "the almost total deregulation of broadcast media" in Italy and the United States helped create conditions that each of them could use to their political advantage.[13]
In The Force of Things: A Marriage in War and Peace (2013), a work supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship[14] that also won the 2014 Blake-Dodd Prize for Nonfiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters,[15] Stille turned his investigative reporting skills to his own family and produced a book that is part memoir, part dual biography of his parents--his journalist father, "a refugee of two countries" who had fled both the Russian Revolution and Italian fascism, and his mother with her "midwestern, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant" background.[16] As Michiko Kakutani assessed it in the New York Times, Stille's portrayal of his parents' "distressing tale of marital woe becomes a fascinating psychological study of two people with complicated family pasts, trying to forge identities of their own--two people with utterly different views and experiences of history."
Stille's latest title, The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune, describes the turbulent existence of a radical psychotherapy group, the Sullivan Institute for Research in Psychoanalysis, whose "founders wanted to start a revolution . . . grounded in ideals of creative expression, sexual liberation, and freedom from societal norms" and that by the 1960s had become "an urban commune of hundreds of people [located on the Upper West Side of Manhattan], with patients living with other patients, leading a creative, polyamorous life."[17] Stille shows, however, how this idealistic endeavor quickly "devolved from a radical communal experiment into an insular cult, with therapists controlling virtually every aspect of their patients' lives, from where they lived to how often they saw their children." As Publishers Weekly attests, The Sullivanians is "an intimate and engrossing look at the . . . group that emerged in 1950s New York City and Amagansett, Long Island" and eventually drew in "celebrity followers [that] included novelists Richard Elman and Richard Price, singer Judy Collins, and art critic Clement Greenberg, who [in turn] recruited painters Jackson Pollock and [Jules] Olitski." Praising Stille's use of "candid interviews with ex-members and their children," the review concludes that the work is a "doggedly researched and thoroughly compassionate . . . page-turning exposé" of the rise and fall of this community.[18] In another advance review that praises its "onrushing, riveting narrative that makes The Blithedale Romance seem like a children's book by comparison," Kirkus asserts that The Sullivanians is "a brilliantly written, sobering investigation of a secret society within plain sight."[19]
He is currently the San Paolo Professor of International Journalism at Columbia.