Will appeal to readers of criminal histories and tales of New York’s political underworld.
Biography of a low-profile “original gangster” who connected the Prohibition era and the “Five Families.”
Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist DeStefano (The Big Heist: The Real Story of the Lufthansa Heist, the Mafia, and Murder, 2017, etc.) creates another readable, well-researched take on organized crime. Frank Costello (1891-1973), writes the author, “was like the fictional bootlegger Jay Gatsby.” Unlike Gatsby, Costello thrived for decades, due to a combination of luck and restraint, even as the American public turned against the gangsters who were elevated during Prohibition. Costello was closely connected to mob heavyweights like Lucky Luciano, and his political connections and aversion to the limelight helped him survive. At the height of his power, Costello and Tammany Hall influenced the nomination of Franklin Roosevelt: “The relationship between the mob and Tammany was one that seemed to be shaped by the reality of their separate worlds.” DeStefano acutely re-creates the strange milieu of New York City politics during the peak of organized crime’s influence, tracking the interplay among Costello, political fixers, law enforcement, and reformers like Fiorello La Guardia. The author notes that important people “were taken in by [Costello’s] smoothness and his persuasiveness.” During the 1940s, he was increasingly pursued by righteous prosecutors, offended by his evident impunity. DeStefano follows his trials, concluding, “since 1927, the box score read: Costello 3 and federal prosecutors 0.” Despite his attempts at respectability, Costello’s notoriety increased, culminating in a 1951 televised appearance. “Of all who testified,” writes the author, “it was Costello who represented what [Sen. Estes] Kefauver saw as the face of organized crime.” DeStefano tells Costello’s story well, yet the nature of his subject’s discreet crime philosophy and careful existence limits the author’s strengths. Apart from a botched attempt on Costello’s life in 1957 organized by Vito Genovese (after which Costello purportedly retired), his story is largely free of violence and dramatic set pieces after Prohibition.
Will appeal to readers of criminal histories and tales of New York’s political underworld.Pub Date: July 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8065-3869-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Citadel/Kensington
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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