by Ed Falco ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 12, 2014
Falco’s style tends toward reportorial, which gives the book a texture different from classic noir yet provides an...
Falco (The Family Corleone, 2012, etc.) dissects a New York City gangland war over Prohibition speak-easies and rumrunning.
In 1931, the Mafia didn't rule Big Apple crime. The illegal booze trade was controlled by a loose confederation called the Combine, made up of a variety of Irish mobsters and the tightfisted, ever angry Dutch Schultz's gang. Falco's plot is anchored by historical gangland figures such as Schultz and Vince Coll—the "Mad Dog" of legend—but it's Coll's fictional friend Loretto Jones who provides perspective. Coll was a soldier in Schultz's gang, which led to his brother’s death; in retribution, he wants to destroy the Combine, led by Owen Madden, another historical figure neatly fitted into the narrative. Coll’s first shot is the attempted assassination of a hot-tempered subcapo. His fusillade kills a child; politicos grab headlines offering big rewards; and the Combine wants blood. With Loretto nearby, witnessing the shooting, the police and the Combine think he was involved. The action moves from the mean streets of the Bronx to basement speak-easies and the fabled Cotton Club, showing Falco's grip on environments from cold-water tenements to greasy spoons. Mad Dog is the most striking character here, a charismatic psychopath. Loretto’s loyal to him, but he’s also tied to the Baronti family, which gives him refuge after he witnesses the shooting; he's also in love with Gina, their beautiful daughter. Loretto grows into a somewhat sympathetic protagonist, considering the mean streets of his youth, through outside influences and introspection. Coll is one-note, his only positive quality a twisted sense of loyal. Madden, Schultz, Luciano and the rest of the historical gang are straight out of newspaper columns yet subtly nuanced. There’s gunplay for action fans, some R-rated gore and PG-sex.
Falco’s style tends toward reportorial, which gives the book a texture different from classic noir yet provides an intriguing read for crime-fiction fans.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-60953-111-9
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Unbridled Books
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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