A serviceable addition to the extensive existing scholarship. Though intelligent and thoughtfully documented, considering...
National Book Award winner Bair (Saul Steinberg, 2012, etc.) examines the life and legend of infamous crime boss Al Capone (1899-1947).
In the 70 years since Capone’s death, America’s fascination with this underworld figure remains as strong as ever. He’s been the subject of countless biographies, his legendary status ingrained in popular culture as an inspiration for the 1930s pre-code film Scarface and, more recently, the popular HBO series Boardwalk Empire. The story of Capone’s rise and fall has long been familiar. He began his criminal career in Brooklyn during the height of Prohibition, involved with businesses ranging from bootlegging to gambling to prostitution, eventually leading to his supreme, albeit brief, reign in Chicago running multimillion-dollar operations. His surprisingly rapid downfall was caused by a conviction for tax evasion, and his prison stints included several years at the notorious Alcatraz Penitentiary. Upon his release in 1939, his final years were diminished by the long-terms effects of syphilis, which led to his early death. Bair attempts to uncover the more personal side of his story, claiming an authoritative position based on the cooperation of extended family members and exclusive access to personal and archival documents. Unfortunately, unlike the author’s previous excellent biographies, the results here are mixed, revealing few new facts or fresh insights. “My intention was to look at his public behavior within the context of his personal life, to see how the two might possibly be interrelated, and how the one might have had influence or bearing on the other,” she writes. “This was not an easy task, and like his family members I still wonder if it is possible to arrive at that curious postmodern concept of ‘the real truth.’ " In this case, it seems not; the “real” Capone remains a mystery.
A serviceable addition to the extensive existing scholarship. Though intelligent and thoughtfully documented, considering the source material and colorful subject, the book is a somewhat anemic read, lacking the narrative verve readers expect from Bair.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-385-53715-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Aug. 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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