Depending on the reader’s level of interest, either too much or too little meat on the bones of these profiles.
Superficial look at the American women who associate with mobsters as wives, mistresses, and daughters.
Today, writes Longrigg, who chronicled the Italian side of this story in Mafia Women (not reviewed), the US mob is concerned less with a code of behavior than with money. The same goes for the women linked in one way or another to organized-crime figures; their motivations range from a desire to prove themselves to greed to a yen for glamour and excitement. What they get instead, they soon learn, is uncertainty, sacrifice, resentment, and guilt. These women are used to hide assets, cover tracks, and block police inquiries. Rarely becoming involved in the actual tradecraft, they are, as the wife of Philip Colletti put it, “the next thing to your pet dog.” Nor is life better for the mistresses (“goombadas”), who find they are rarely released without some form of pain. Longrigg profiles a handful of Mafia women, but her portraits rarely get under the skin. Bonanno family head Anthony Graziano’s daughter, a classic princess who would be hard matched for sheer bitchery (“patrons of the golf course across the road were bemused to witness the full rage of Lana Zancocchio”); Victoria Gotti, who in her memoir “ended up believing the hype and elevated her father’s criminal career to the level of statesmanship”; the courageous wife who took the stand against her insanely violent husband—they all remain a “mystery” to the author, which leaves little hope the readers will get much from these depictions. It’s difficult enough to understand the behavior of these women; banal comments such as “Her husband . . . used to beat up people for a living. Caroline just adores him” don’t exactly add a lot of insight.
Depending on the reader’s level of interest, either too much or too little meat on the bones of these profiles.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-4013-5185-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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