FIRE UNDER THE ASHES by James McNeish. 324 pages. Beacon Press. $5.95.
Sanctity is hard to explain—even when it is present. Saints have often been impossible people who undertook impossible tasks and succeeded in highly improbable ways.
Such a one is Danilo Dolci, a 41-year-old Italian who for 14 years has headed a volunteer movement designed to lift a few Sicilian villages out of a squalor unmatched in Europe and to raise the inhabitants from the torpor of despair. Dolci (TIME, April 9, 1956) has been proposed for the Nobel Peace Prize, denounced by the...