An Italian Fable
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An Italian Fable takes place before, during and after World War II, when fictional hero Mark O’Brien, an OSS spy, meets with real-life figures Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Pope Pius XII before switching places with his look-alike cousin, Irish Monsignor Tom Shaw during the war. After the war, FDR makes him Commander-in-Chief, Allied Forces, Italy, where he begins a 5-year partnership with post-war Italian President Alcide DeGasperi that dramatically changed Italy.
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About the Book
An Italian Fable takes place before, during and after World War II, when fictional hero Mark O’Brien, an OSS spy, meets with real-life figures Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Pope Pius XII before switching places with his look-alike cousin, Irish Monsignor Tom Shaw during the war. After the war, FDR makes him Commander-in-Chief, Allied Forces, Italy, where he begins a 5-year partnership with post-war Italian President Alcide DeGasperi that dramatically changed Italy.
About the Author
Speer was born in Manhattan in 1936, graduated from M.I.T. in 1957 (Business and Engineering), and completed his Naval service in Naples, Italy in 1961. He then lived in Milan for these 10 years while starting his family, working as a management consultant to Fiat, Pirelli, Edison, the Vatican Holding Company, and General Electric during the industrial ‘Italian Miracle’ of the 1960s.
He returned to California with his family in 1971, obtained his CPA certificate in 1978, and operated as a sole practitioner and part-time CFO for hi-tech start-up companies until his retirement in 2006, when he began this novel while living deep in the heart of Tuscany. His second novel, An American Fable, transports this book’s themes 65 years forward to the 2008 elections.