John Gotti now sits in a top-security federal prison, locked into his cell 23 hours a day, allowed to shower once a week. How the Mafia's capo di tutti capi reached that sorry fate is the subject of Blum's intensively researched, hypnotically absorbing true-crime report. There have been other excellent books on Gotti (e.g., John Cummings and Ernest Volkman's Goombata, 1990), but none written with Blum's flair for drama (Out There, 1990, etc.). What the former New York Times reporter does here is give Gotti a worthy opponent: FBI agent Bruce Mouw, hero to Gotti's villain, Eliot Ness to his Al Capone. To trace Mouw's pursuit of Gotti—which Blum dates back to the June 1980 day when the ``gangly, rather scholarly-looking'' Iowa-born agent was named to head the Bureau's Gambino Family squad—the author conducted 108 interviews and ``made [his] way through a wall-high pile of transcripts.'' As Blum intercuts between Mouw's squad (which included Joseph F. O'Brien and Andris Kurins, whose surveillance of Gotti's predecessor, Paul Castellano, they detailed in Boss of Bosses, 1991) and Gotti's ``crew'' as it rises to power, this diligent research reveals itself in unusual details about Gotti's character (his affair with another mobster's wife; his courtroom reading of Thus Spake Zarathustra); in suspenseful re-creations of the bugging of Gotti's various headquarters; in inside information on how Mouw suborned Gotti's underboss. Blum tends to overmelodramatize—highlighting faint rumor (e.g., that Gotti chain-sawed the man who accidentally killed his young son); overplaying certain themes, like Mouw's hunt for a cop-mole, or the Dapper Don's smirk—but there's no denying the fire-breathing power of his Gotti or the cinematic slickness of his account of Mouw's dogged, righteous manhunt. FBI knight slays Mafia dragon—and Blum milks this latter-day fairy tale for all it's worth. (First serial to New York Magazine; film rights sold to Columbia Pictures)
Pub Date: Nov. 8, 1993
ISBN: 0-671-68758-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author’s literate, committed voice sometimes disappears in his tangled wood of allusion and quotation.
The veteran Washington Post columnist and TV commentator offers a richly documented history of and argument for a wider embrace of conservative political values.
“Richly documented” is an understatement. Will (A Nice Little Place on the North Side: Wrigley Field at One Hundred, 2014, etc.) is nothing if not a thorough, dedicated researcher and thinker, but he’s often prolix. Many of the historical figures the author references will come as no surprise—e.g., Burke, Moynihan, Madison, Locke—and there are also plenty from the literary world; these include allusions to Twain and Fitzgerald, whose closing sentences from The Great Gatsby provide Will with a metaphor for his principal points. Not much the Pulitzer winner offers here will surprise those who have paid attention to his rhetoric over the decades. His three American heroes remain: Washington, Lincoln, John Marshall. He thinks the U.S. government has grown too big, that it is too interested in providing entitlements (Will is a believer in much more self-reliance than he sees evident today), that schools and universities should do a much more rigorous job of transmitting the Western historical heritage, and that progressives just don’t understand how America is supposed to work. However, in one chapter, he may surprise some readers: He declares he is an atheist (though “amiable, low-voltage”), and he spends a few pages reminding us that the founders were not particularly religious and that we must observe the separation of church and state. He praises the civil rights movement but asserts that much of it has gone wrong. Oddly missing are direct references to the current occupant of the White House, though Will does zing many of his predecessors (from both parties but principally Democrats), mostly for their failure to comprehend fully the concept of liberty that fueled the founders.
The author’s literate, committed voice sometimes disappears in his tangled wood of allusion and quotation.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-48093-2
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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