A messy entry in a category of sportswriting that’s produced much better.
A grab bag of stories about the American boxing world and how the Mob transformed it in the 1950s.
Jacobs Beach wasn’t actually a beach, but a stretch of pavement in Manhattan around which the boxing world revolved from the mid-’30s to the late-’50s. There, tickets for bouts at Madison Square Garden were sold, pairings were hashed out, drinks were swilled and mobsters jostled to manipulate the outcome of individual fights. By the end of the ’50s, professional boxing was so transparently corrupt that Sen. Estes Kefauver launched hearings on the Mob’s control of the sport, attracting millions of viewers through television. Thanks to the scrutiny, London Observer chief sportswriter Mitchell (War, Baby: The Glamour of Violence, 2001, etc.) writes, the boxing world is now more aboveboard but less entertaining than it used to be. The author knows his boxing history, and he delivers plenty of information on people like Mike Jacobs (the ticket-seller for whom the “beach” was named), boxers Joe Louis and Jake LaMotta, trainers and managers like Cus D’Amato and mobsters like Frankie Carbo. Unfortunately, Mitchell shows little interest in adhering to a narrative thread while discussing the world around Madison Square Garden, which makes his book feel like what the old-school reporters he admires called a notebook dump. Paragraphs leap from detailed information about fight purses to the Kefauver hearings to musings on the ring styles of fighters like James J. Braddock and Kid Gavilan. Mitchell also affects a tough-talking tone that’s presumably meant to evoke the noirish spirit of the times but too often makes him appear superior to the subject he’s discussing. In the later chapters, the author all but abandons any pretense of organization and instead delivers a series of profiles of luminaries like promoter Don King, painter LeRoy Neiman and On the Waterfront writer Budd Schulberg. Mitchell’s access to such people is impressive, but the interviews do more to burnish outsize reputations than illuminate boxing’s underworld.
A messy entry in a category of sportswriting that’s produced much better.Pub Date: Dec. 14, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-60598-123-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2010
A tour-de-force of true crime reportage.
Godfrey reconstructs a horrific murder with a vividness found in the finest fiction, without ever sacrificing journalistic integrity.
The novel The Torn Skirt (2002) showed how well the author could capture the roiling inner life of a teenager. She brings that sensibility to bear in this account of the 1997 murder of a 14-year-old girl in British Columbia, a crime for which seven teenage girls and one boy were charged. While there’s no more over-tilled literary soil than that of the shocking murder in a small town, Godfrey manages to portray working-class View Royal in a fresh manner. The victim, Reena Virk, was a problematic kid. Rebelling against her Indian parents’ strict religiosity, she desperately mimicked the wannabe gangsta mannerisms of her female schoolmates, who repaid her idolization by ignoring her. The circumstances leading up to the murder seem completely trivial: a stolen address book, a crush on the wrong guy. But popular girls like Josephine and Kelly had created a vast, imaginary world (mostly stolen from mafia movies and hip-hop) in which they were wildly desired and feared. In this overheated milieu, reality was only a distant memory, and everything was allowed. The murder and cover-up are chilling. Godfrey parcels out details piecemeal in the words of the teens who took part or simply watched. None of them seemed to quite comprehend what was going on, why it happened or even—in a few cases—what the big deal was. The tone veers close to melodrama, but in this context it works, since the author is telling the story from the inside out, trying to approximate the relentlessly self-dramatizing world these kids inhabited. Given most readers’ preference for easily explained and neatly concluded crime narratives, Godfrey’s resolute refusal to impose false order on the chaos of a murder spawned by rumors and lies is commendable.
A tour-de-force of true crime reportage.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-1091-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author brings the case for judicial redress before the court of public opinion.
A former Justice Department lawyer, who now devotes her private practice to federal appeals, dissects some of the most politically contentious prosecutions of the last 15 years.
Powell assembles a stunning argument for the old adage, “nothing succeeds like failure,” as she traces the careers of a group of prosecutors who were part of the Enron Task Force. The Supreme Court overturned their most dramatic court victories, and some were even accused of systematic prosecutorial misconduct. Yet former task force members such as Kathryn Ruemmler, Matthew Friedrich and Andrew Weissman continued to climb upward through the ranks and currently hold high positions in the Justice Department, FBI and even the White House. Powell took up the appeal of a Merrill Lynch employee who was convicted in one of the subsidiary Enron cases, fighting for six years to clear his name. The pattern of abuse she found was repeated in other cases brought by the task force. Prosecutors of the accounting firm Arthur Andersen pieced together parts of different statutes to concoct a crime and eliminated criminal intent from the jury instructions, which required the Supreme Court to reverse the Andersen conviction 9-0; the company was forcibly closed with the loss of 85,000 jobs. In the corruption trial of former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, a key witness was intimidated into presenting false testimony, and as in the Merrill Lynch case, the prosecutors concealed exculpatory evidence from the defense, a violation of due process under the Supreme court’s 1963 Brady v. Maryland decision. Stevens’ conviction, which led to a narrow loss in his 2008 re-election campaign and impacted the majority makeup of the Senate, seems to have been the straw that broke the camel's back; the presiding judge appointed a special prosecutor to investigate abuses. Confronted with the need to clean house as he came into office, writes Powell, Attorney General Eric Holder has yet to take action.
The author brings the case for judicial redress before the court of public opinion.Pub Date: May 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61254-149-5
Page Count: 456
Publisher: Brown Books
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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