Despite minor flaws, there is much to learn and enjoy for crime-solving fans and American history buffs.
A thorough recounting of the career of Eliot Ness (1903–1957), from humble beginning to humble ending, with spectacular fame in between.
Al Capone may have gone to prison for tax evasion, but Perry (The Girls of Murder City: Fame, Lust, and the Beautiful Killers Who Inspired Chicago, 2010) understands that the name Ness is synonymous with shutting down Capone's bootleg operation. The author ably shows that there was far more to Ness’ career than just his battles with Capone, with accomplishments that may even outweigh his work during Prohibition. Unlike many of his colleagues, Ness did not fade into the background when the law was repealed. After a short stint in Cincinnati, he moved to Cleveland, where the mayor made him director of public safety with instructions to clean up the city. His years in Cleveland were probably the best of his career, with Ness implementing many firsts in the police department that are now standard procedure. Unfortunately, after leaving Cleveland, Ness never re-entered law enforcement and wasn't successful in his other work. Alongside intense and energetic investigative tales, Perry injects humor into the story with anecdotes—e.g., when a Cleveland patrolman, gun drawn, stopped Ness on the street. Though Ness identified himself, the patrolman was skeptical, insisting he was just as likely to be President Franklin D. Roosevelt. “Eliot carefully produced his ID and said that, with FDR’s approval, he would like to be on his way,” writes the author. Perry also peppers the book with his own colorful language. While this works in his favor when he calls a bad area of town “Cleveland’s colostomy bag,” it is jarring and off-kilter when he writes that Ness “gave Stafford a little smile, savoring the moment like a postcoital cigarette.”
Despite minor flaws, there is much to learn and enjoy for crime-solving fans and American history buffs.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-670-02588-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2014
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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