Terrifically readable, and rich in personal stories.
A lively narrative of the author’s experiences reacquainting Afghan women with skills the mullahs had denied them.
Michigan-born Rodriguez arrived in Kabul in May 2002 with the Care for All Foundation, a Christian humanitarian organization. She’d had emergency and disaster-relief training, but as soon as her group leader mentioned at a meeting that she was a hairdresser, she was mobbed by foreign-aid workers desperate for a decent haircut. The Taliban had banned beauty parlors, and the ones that had opened since its fall suffered from years of inactivity. When her young protégée Roshanna took her to a secret salon in Kabul, Rodriguez was shocked by the meager supplies and the staff’s rudimentary skills. She embarked on a mission to start a beauty school in Kabul. She worked on getting product donations from hair-care companies like Paul Mitchell. She enlisted help from Mary MacMakin, the American head of a nonprofit organization geared toward helping Afghan widows. Living on and off in Kabul, Rodriguez found a suitable building and opened her school to about 30 students, whose hard-luck stories fill these pages. Often uneducated, married in their teens, locked away to languish at home or beaten into submission, these women were eager to gain self-sufficiency and self-worth. The vast cultural gap between them and their teacher could make instruction difficult. Struggling to explain that sometimes when coloring hair, the beautician had to neutralize an underlying pigment to get the desired shade, for example, Rodriguez just wasn’t getting through until she had the inspiration to declare, “Think of it as Satan! It’s this evil thing in the hair that you have to fight.” She became so comfortable in her new country that she agreed to an arranged marriage with an enlightened Afghan businessman. Today, she writes, “I’ve been renewed by the spirit of this place and roused by its challenges.”
Terrifically readable, and rich in personal stories.Pub Date: April 17, 2007
ISBN: 1-4000-6559-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An insider peep into the New YorkNew Jersey crime networks. With the help of Wagman (The Nazi Hunters, not reviewed), former wiseguy Fresolone begins his gritty confessions of life as a mobster with the hair-raising scene of his own induction ceremony into the Bruno crime family. Fresolone is already working for the Feds and has strapped to his body more than one tape recorder. It is to be the first-ever taping of a Mafia initiation ceremony- -complete with the blood-letting from the initiate's finger. In the old days, Fresolone laments, they used to mop up the blood with fragments of a saint's picture; now they ``make do'' with tissue paper. The Mob was everything the young Fresolone hoped for growing up in the Down Neck section of Newark. Down Neck was controlled by the powerful Bruno family based in Philadelphia, run nominally by the ``reluctant don'' Angelo Bruno, a mild and compromising kind of man. The real power, though, was the fearsome Tony Bananas, with ``Patty Specs,'' i.e. Pasquale Martirano, as his underboss. After Bananas had Bruno assassinated, he assumed control of the Bruno family enterprise and became our hero's employer. The relation was a tense one. In the end, Fresolone seems to have felt intense personal loyalty only to Specs, a man already dying of liver cancer. Fresolone points out that interfamily murder and strife is comparatively rare these days. It is, rather, internal family violence that is the current curse of Mob hierarchies and that seems to have most affected Fresolone. Eventually, his collaboration with the Feds brought in almost 40 major Mob figures, a fact of which he seems genuinely proud, as if it is a just retribution for what he sees as the Mafia's betrayal of its own principles of loyalty and honor. Not a prose masterpiece, but the genuine article as far as Mob documents go. With its personal touch and its relentless detail, it's a solidly alarming read.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-77905-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
US Customs special agent Gately (aided by freelancer Fernandez) describes a sting operation that brought down two Mafia operatives and transformed them into useful turncoats for the federal Protected Witness Program. Leo Fraley and Joe Cuffaro were not hardened mob insiders but victims of their environment. Fraley was the son of an honest teamster truck driver who drifted into the fringes of the mob while stoning ``scabs'' at steel mills during strikes and beating them for cash. He was eventually taken in by Dominic ``Mad Bomb'' Denobis, one of the original members of Murder, Inc., who made Fraley a liaison between the American mob and the Medellin concern in Colombia. The book's first chapter shows him being canoed through the rain forest in the magisterial company of an English- accented drug lord named Velasco en route to a cocaine rendezvous; the surreal trip is made amusing by the wary discomfort of the tough Yankee urban mobster forced by ``business'' into an exotic environment, and the picture of a jungle drug factory is fascinating. Cuffaro's is a different story. He came to the US at the age of 17 after his father, a marble wholesaler from Palermo, was bombed out of business by the Mafia. In a bitterly ironic twist, the Gambino family in New York made the wholesaler proprietor of one of their groceries and trained Joe as a master meat-cutter at one of their dubious meat market ventures in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Perhaps Cuffaro retained some bitterness over this humiliation of his father. In any case, after the successful sting and the incarceration of Cuffaro and Fraley, both men seemed to take a perverse delight in mocking their fellow mobsters locked up with them. An entertaining and well-researched book, carefully put together and structured. Its evocation of working-class ``wiseguy'' life is unfailingly and depressingly authentic.
Pub Date: Sept. 20, 1994
ISBN: 1-55611-396-X
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Donald Fine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
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