Rise From Want: A Peasant Family in the Machine Age

Rise From Want explores the ways in which a family of poor peasants from the Karst plateau above Trieste, Italy, lived through the great changes brought about by industrialization and modernization. The book is a careful and imaginative reconstruction of the lives of some humble and illiterate people who left behind them few traces of their existence.

Through a gripping narrative of the Žužek family, Davis explores the social changes that accompanied the peasants' "rise from want." During th...