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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
