For a recent review in 4Columns, Eric Banks discusses Castrato Phantoms: Moreschi, Fellini, and the Sacred Vernacular of Rome by Martha Feldman. Click here to learn more about the book. Click here to read the full review. An excerpt appears below:

“The history of opera and sacred music; the birth of recording technology; Italian cultural politics in the nascent moment of Fascism and in the time of postwar reckoning, especially in Fellini’s cinema; the unearthed story of family littered with episodes of failure, anger, and betrayal: Feldman’s narrative, or set of narratives, contains multitudes, as they say. She attempts to weave together all these strands as a kind of lipstick-traces history of myriad points of inflection where Moreschi the man and Moreschi the figure serve as phantom presences. It is a daunting task, and the path gets thorny in places. Yet for a text that at many points loses itself in a thicket of high-theory expository tics, including a thorny patch of fusty “hauntology studies” (flora rarely spotted in the wild in the past couple of decades), as well as some fairly imposing mountains of musicological analysis, it’s remarkably personal, almost intimate at times.”