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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Old Fezziwig" data-source="post: 9313357" data-attributes="member: 59">My Kindle died right as I was starting The Longest Minute, so I picked up a physical book that I had started but not finished, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society by Edward C. Banfield.  (This is the riveting non-fiction that lives in my nightstand.) It's about the pseudonymous town of Montegrano in Basilicata in southern Italy and how the townspeople engage with each other and their motivations for doing the things they do, which all comes down to a system that Banfield calls amoral familism, which loosely boils down to looking out for number one, where number one is the nuclear family. It was interesting, but kind of a depressing read. Entirely too familiar in too many ways.</blockquote>