title: Amalia's Tale: An Impoverished Peasant Woman, an Ambitious Attorney, and a Fight for Justice
author:  David I. Kertzer 
description: Starred Review. In this absorbing account, Amalia Bagnacavalli's tale is a horrific one. An impoverished Italian peasant in the late 19th century, Amalia was hired as a wet nurse and contracted syphilis from the infant assigned her by a Bologna foundling home. She in turn spread the disease to her husband and their baby daughter and sons. Her plight was common, Kertzer notes, in a Europe plagued for centuries by poverty, prostitution, venereal disease and legal-religious mores that forced unwed mothers to give up their newborns to institutions where they would be nursed by strangers. But Amalia took the very modern step of suing the foundling home and its aristocratic board, helped by a young lawyer eager to impose a scientific, bureaucratically controlled regimen on an antiquated welfare system. Amalia's court victory over the Italian medical establishment was no feel-good triumph of justice: her lawyer screwed her out of every penny of the huge settlement she won, and the system of bottle-feeding prompted by her suit killed most of the foundlings subjected to it. Like Kertzer's much-praised <i>The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara</i>, Amalia's story is a rich social history, in which new values clash with old in an Italy wracked by the fitful march of progress. <i>(Mar. 6)</i> <br />Copyright  Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
zlib_text: The playboy sheikh’s last temptation...
  Thanks to a recent scandalous exposé, the damage to Sheikh Zayn Al-
  Ghamdi’s reputation is threatening his family’s future.
  So when fiercely independent Amalia Christensen has the gall to blackmail
  him with further ruination to ensure her innocent brother’s freedom, Zayn
  chooses to keep his enemies close...and make Amalia his temporary fiancée!
  Zayn’s only duty is to his country. He can’t allow himself any emotional ties.
  But the hunger Amalia unleashes in him soon tempts the playboy sheikh to
  take their relationship from business to the bedroom...
  
  “I’m going to kiss you, Amalia. This is your
  moment to go all outraged on me and call me a
  savage beast.”
  If possible, she stiffened even more in Zayn’s hold.
  “I...refuse to provide you with any more entertainment. I was right in
  thinking that you would be just as bloated and corrupted with power as—”
  Whatever outrage Amalia had amassed to fight the man’s autocratic ideas and
  her own out-of-control se