"In 1895, an Italian seamstress in New York was accused of killing the man who had raped her, promised to marry her, and was about to abandon her. Following a sensational trial conducted in a language she could not understand, Maria Barbella, at the age of twenty-two, became the first woman sentenced to die in the newly invented electric chair. Idanna Pucci tells this story with immediacy, passion and authority that no other author could have mustered,...