Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's brief but brilliant writing career lasted a mere two years before he succumbed to lung cancer. In that time he produced one novel (The Leopard), three stories, and the beginning of a memoir, Places of my Infancy - a "tour" of Lampedusa's family estates in Sicily at the turn of 20thcentury. "For me childhood was a lost paradise," writes Lampedusa. "I was king of the home." Lampedusa gives lush, intimate descriptions of...