An entertaining, sometimes grisly stroll through Gotham’s bad old days.
On-the-ground tour of places, extant and extinct, where key episodes in New York’s organized crime history took place.
“Few of the characters we meet here end well. Fewer deserve to….Just don’t turn your back on anyone,” writes Pietrusza at the beginning of this wide-ranging compendium of people and places. It’s good advice, for even if one of those scenes has since become “the much more respectable site of a Whole Foods,” there are still plenty of criminal venues that still stand today—though most have been repurposed. For instance, the old Knickerbocker Hotel, on 42nd Street and Broadway in the heart of today’s theater district, was once a hangout for the gangster Arnold Rothstein (about whom Pietrusza has written a biography), enjoying a dining room captained by a budding restaurateur named Vincent Sardi. Rothstein used the Knickerbocker as a venue for his “high-stakes floating card and craps games,” and the hotel was also, conveniently, where his lawyer kept his office. The Knickerbocker may now be a condominium complex, but the spirits of gangsters and patsies, to say nothing of onetime resident F. Scott Fitzgerald, still hang over the place. Though he made a decent buck arranging such events as the Chicago “Black Sox” throwing of the 1919 World Series, Rothstein was mortally shot at a nearby hotel for, by one account, having run up one too many unpaid debts. As Pietrusza notes in passing, though the World Series scandal took place in Chicago, it was a New York–born scheme—and a New York journalist took the lead in exposing it. William Randolph Hearst, Jimmy Durante, Babe Ruth, W.C. Fields, Damon Runyon: All figure in these spry pages, featuring countless episodes of the bad behavior that New York’s gangland concocted. The book includes a chronology and cast of characters.
An entertaining, sometimes grisly stroll through Gotham’s bad old days.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2023
ISBN: 9781635769890
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Diversion Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2023
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
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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