The heir to legendary Mafia patriarch Joseph Bonanno describes the eclipse of a once-formidable criminal empire, with buffeting verbiage but only moderate amounts of candor. Bonanno begins with his 1956 wedding to a Profaci Family daughter, then goes on to detail the disastrous Appalachin conclave (which informed the general public of the Mob’s existence), the fraying of the “Commission” that had long maintained peace and order, and the betrayals and factional confusion that allegedly culminated in the assassination of President Kennedy. His first-person account of secret criminal history is badly undermined by poor editing. Flabby, repetitive writing and clichÇd phrases abound, as does vagueness regarding the realities of Mob criminality. Endless musings about long-dead codes of loyalty and respect annoy in contrast with the dearth of specific detail regarding Mob violence and business influence during this era . The book thus resembles a bowdlerized retelling of The Godfather, with very little of the gritty immediacy one finds in such studies as Nicholas Pileggi’s Wiseguy. It’s not without merit, though; Bonanno profiles many major figures in the Five Families, clarifying both their ties to infamous predecessors such as Luciano and Anastasia, and their roles in the pyrrhic wars that, along with increased federal scrutiny in the decade following Kennedy’s death, essentially doomed the classical model of the American Mafia. The book’s best moments come near the end, when Bonanno convincingly portrays rogue FBI agents from the infamous CoIntelPro, whose efforts to “get the Mob” included bombings and witness intimidation, and who ultimately secured the author a long prison term resulting from a credit card “misunderstanding.” His jail experience yields one red-hot revelation: the confession of the alleged 11/22/63 triggerman, a Chicago Mob stalwart named Johnny Roselli. Given Bonanno’s knowledge of hidden Mafia history, one wishes his literary handlers had been less hasty in rushing a flawed book into the mob-opera marketplace. ($100,000 ad/promo; TV rights to Showtime; author tour)
Pub Date: May 25, 1999
ISBN: 0-312-20388-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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
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