Readers going through the illness and passing of a parent, to say nothing of true-crime buffs, will find much of value.
A moving memoir of the passage through life of a father and son, each facing tremendous difficulties.
The title is hyperbolic, perhaps, but LaRossa Jr. makes a good case for the gladiatorial nature of the courtroom. His father, known as Jimmy LaRossa (1931-2014), was a criminal defense attorney who took on cases for “the most feared Mafia chiefs, assassins, counterfeiters, Orthodox Jewish money launderers, defrocked politicians of every stripe, and Arab bankers arriving in the dead of night in their private jets.” By his son’s reckoning, over a long career, Jimmy argued at nearly 1,000 jury trials and won 80% of them. He adds, “did Jimmy know where the bodies were buried? Yes, he did.” The author, who became a journalist and publisher, writes admiringly of the fact that his father, the scourge of the FBI and despiser of stool pigeons, stayed alive for all those years of engagement with mob bosses and henchmen with names like “The German” and “Wild Bill,” foot soldiers for the Colombo and Gambino families. One case found him disqualifying evidence provided by a member of a rival gang, who, Jimmy argued, “had committed murders while on the FBI’s payroll.” Eventually, however, Jimmy fell victim to pulmonary disease, prompting his son to move his father from New York to California, where Jimmy spent the last few years of his life. The author, for his part, has suffered through long bouts of mental illness, self-medicating with alcohol while diligently seeking appropriate and effective treatment. He credits taking care of his father in his last years as a lifesaver: “Until he allowed me to take charge of his life, I was as lost as a man can be.” Though the writing is sometimes clichéd—“My father was my true north, so I bought into his exuberance lock, stock, and barrel. My three siblings…had other fish to fry”—the story is affecting.
Readers going through the illness and passing of a parent, to say nothing of true-crime buffs, will find much of value.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61088-239-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bancroft Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2019
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 Yorker staff 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
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
© Copyright 2024 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.
