A less than compelling crime-doesn't-pay saga.
The notorious Sing Sing prison may be the most memorable character in this grim tale of crime and punishment.
Home of the electric chair in which 614 men and women (including Julius and Ethel Rosenberg) were executed, it was the setting for James Cagney's famous “last mile” walk in the film Angels with Dirty Faces and several other 1930s B-movies. Goewey, the son, grandson and brother of Sing Sing guards, effectively relates the infamous prison’s lore. He also does a creditable job of re-creating the grimy pre–World War II Hell's Kitchen neighborhood that serves as the story's other major backdrop. It was there, amid the West Side waterfront and nearby tenements, that “Whitey” Riordan and “Patches” Waters grew up, young street toughs whose hardscrabble childhoods seemed inexorably to lead to depressingly brief lives of crime. Riordan was first arrested in 1927, at age 12, and spent much of his life in and out of prison. He later joined neighborhood pal Waters to form the notorious “Shopping Bag Gang,” resulting in their jailing at Sing Sing in 1940 following a string of armed robberies. Unfortunately, Riordan, Waters and their “breakout” partner, another hardened con named Charlie McGale, hardly make for intriguing characters. Small-time hustlers turned career criminals, they never rise above the level of unsavory hoodlum. Moreover, the infamous “crash out” recounted here turns out to be a comedy of errors in which the carefully conceived escape plan collapses even before it begins, leading to the deaths of two police officers. Adding to the anticlimactic feel of the story is the fact that our Sing Sing fugitives were captured within a few miles of the prison only hours after their escape. Oddly, Goewey never provides the names of the police officers who brutally interrogated the captured fugitives, beatings that would have surely warranted a full-scale investigation today. It's also disappointing that he doesn't include any of the numerous photographs that documented the capture and subsequent trial.
A less than compelling crime-doesn't-pay saga.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-5469-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2005
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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