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NO QUESTIONS ASKED

Name: NO QUESTIONS ASKED
Author: Clare Longrigg
ISBN: 1-4013-5185-9

THE SECRET LIFE OF WOMEN IN THE MOB

by Clare Longrigg ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2004

Depending on the reader’s level of interest, either too much or too little meat on the bones of these profiles.

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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

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | TRUE CRIME | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)