Meryle Secrest

Meryle Secrest has written highly acclaimed biographies of artists and architects including Modigliani, Bernstein, Wright, and Berenson, and now in her eighties, she turns to the brilliant Italian industrialists Adriano Olivetti. But instead of writing a straight biography, she posits a conspiracy in which American intelligence services, concerned about powerful minicomputers becoming available to Cold War enemies, assassinate the head of Olivetti's desktop computing project, and then Olivetti himself. While this is not entirely implausible given the history of American Cold War interventionism in Cuba, Guatemala, Chile, Iran, Zaire, and many other places, neither is it, despite Secrest's efforts, entirely convincing. In fact, she would have done much better to fold her idea into a more standard biography of Olivetti—the company, the dynasty, or the man, all of which are (really!) interesting enough to support that project.

Those histories have been written, I believe, in Italian, but not to my knowledge translated to English. Until they are, this book will have to do as an introduction to Adriano Olivetti and his remarkable vision of a humane and democratic industrial society, which he successfully nursed through the Fascist era and the second world war into the cold war period. Now the immense Olivetti complex in Ivrea stands mostly unoccupied and one of the most interesting socio-industrial projects of the twentieth century is in danger of being forgotten. If only we had a chronicler who finds that story the most interesting one. Meanwhile, this book, despite its flaws, is well worth the read.… (mehr)