An amusing trifle.
Sensational cases from a legendary New York City detective’s career.
Fans of Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York already have some idea of the environment that gave rise to 19th-century policeman Thomas Byrnes (1842–1910): the poverty-stricken, crime- and vice-ridden Five Points area of Manhattan. Byrnes first drew attention as a young police officer helping to quell the 1863 draft riots. During the course of his 40-year career in the Tammany Hall–dominated city, the Irish immigrant became, thanks in part to a series of admiring popular detective works authored by Julian Hawthorne, a celebrated chief inspector of the Detective Bureau and eventually superintendent of police. Famed for his doggedness and attention to detail, Byrnes pioneered a number of innovative crime-fighting techniques, including the now-commonplace practice of thoroughly investigating a crime scene, keeping extensive records (including mug shots) on the city’s notorious criminals, initiating police line-ups, employing rudimentary blood analysis and a crude form of ballistics and compiling statistics on his own Bureau’s effectiveness. Making liberal use of period newspaper accounts, coloring pertinent years through a somewhat clunky device he terms “American Almanac,” Conway (King of Heists: The Sensational Bank Robbery of 1878 that Shocked America, 2009, etc.) spotlights a series of high-profile cases featuring Byrnes: prostitute murders, the killing of flamboyant speculator “Jubilee Jim” Fiske, the shooting of a wine merchant, the stalking of financier Jay Gould, the arrest of anarchist Emma Goldman, the robbery at Manhattan Savings and the theft of a millionaire’s entombed body. Each case helps explain how the secretive Byrnes developed his revolutionary procedures and how he burnished his reputation by skillful press manipulation and friendship with the city’s Wall Street powerbrokers. Conway also frequently remarks on Byrne’s penchant for abusive tactics, beating confessions out of suspects and securing questionable convictions. Though never personally linked to corruption, Byrnes presided over a thoroughly rotten department. Muckraking journalists and crusading Rev. Charles Parkhurst helped force his resignation, happily accepted by Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt in 1895.
An amusing trifle.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-59921-965-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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