A gritty, sociologically engaging memoir.
A debut memoir that revisits Boglioli’s 10 years in the crack-cocaine subculture of New York City in the 1980s and ’90s.
The author writes that he’d already begun using crack before his career as a chef—first at the prestigious 21 Club and then at the Ritz Carlton Hotel—came to an end. It was the mid-’80s, and 30-something Boglioli was disillusioned with “the Establishment” and mesmerized by the freedom of life as an outcast: “With crack an entire alternative universe opened for me, mutable, unencumbered by the mores and strictures of society, a savage blossoming of emotions and passions too long held in check.” Sometime during his journey through the city’s streets, assorted flophouses, and church-run shelters, he cleaned up and secured a job as the head chef for another prestigious (unnamed) restaurant. With a steady income, he began drinking heavily, he writes, and within a year, he was back on crack; amazingly, he managed to last two years in his job before being fired. Ultimately, Boglioli spent a decade immersing himself in New York’s seedy underbelly, intermittently holding down a variety of day jobs to supplement his government assistance. As his 50s approached, he realized that he likely wouldn’t survive his lifestyle much longer, so he moved to Vermont for a healthier environment. In this memoir, he paints graphic portraits of the mostly hidden (or ignored) denizens of Manhattan—the drunks, the addicts, the sex workers, and the social service employees who served (and underserved) them. It’s also a long, angry, philosophical manifesto condemning what he sees as the hypocrisy and materialism of the dominant society that flourishes in the midst of it all. This book can be profoundly unsettling, and it’s not for the squeamish. Boglioli’s prose is sometimes eloquent, but it’s also heavily embellished and lengthy, and it’s easy to get lost in its ramblings: “the deserted streets belonged to the night owls and the underground moiety, emerging from their rookeries, from under their rocks, their burned-out buildings, their favellas, going about their devious monkey business, moving swiftly, surreptitious and secretive.” A 20-page glossary will help readers through the more esoteric linguistic choices.
A gritty, sociologically engaging memoir.Pub Date: March 8, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 463
Publisher: Midway Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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