People-watching from a scientist with a message.
An urban ethnographer studies the racial dynamics of semi-public spaces in Philadelphia and finds in them the possibility of a new social civility among city dwellers.
Anderson (Sociology/Yale Univ.; Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City, 1999, etc.) takes readers on a revealing tour of Philadelphia’s “urban canopies,” neutral social settings where people of diverse backgrounds encounter one another and go about their business—shopping, eating, hanging about, meeting friends—in an usually calm and pleasant atmosphere. The author’s favorite example is the large Reading Terminal Market, a group of former train sheds transformed into an enclosed public market. This market and other cosmopolitan canopies, such as Rittenhouse Square, a jazz club, an off-track betting parlor and a shopping-mall food court, provide, in Anderson’s view, places where the usual social tensions and wariness of strangers in a largely segregated city give way to a certain civility. Exposure to and close encounters with individuals of different social, racial and ethnic backgrounds may give people familiarity with their fellow human beings, folks they might otherwise view in a stereotypical fashion. People could potentially take this newfound knowledge about others back to their segregated neighborhoods. Anderson also looks outside the cosmopolitan canopies at social situations where the color line dividing black and white still exists and pretenses of tolerance break down. Anecdotes abound, and the author includes excerpts from his own journal of his perambulations and observations, giving his account immediacy and verisimilitude. The writing is generally crisp and clear, free of sociological jargon, and thus accessible to most readers.
People-watching from a scientist with a message.Pub Date: March 28, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-393-07163-4
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2011
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
