A telling look inside the twisted world of organized crime, sure to interest those who follow mob mayhem.
“He would shoot you in the head over a cold ravioli.” When it comes to mob psychos, Chicago Tribune writer Coen writes, there’s no place like the Windy City.
With players like Joey “The Clown” Lombardo, Tony “Big Tuna” Accardo and Jimmy “Poker” DiForti, it could hardly be otherwise. For decades, writes the author, the Chicago Mafia maintained a unified front, working under “one ‘Old Man,’ a shadow mayor of sorts” and, unlike its East Coast counterpart, holding strictly to the time-honored code of silence. Fortunately for the law, the Chicago Outfit, as it was known, had its share of human foibles. When things got ugly, torn by drugs and power feuds, some of the syndicate’s foot soldiers went freelance. One was Frank Calabrese Jr., son of a powerful loan shark, who provided the FBI with juicy details about such events as the slaying of the brothers Spilotro, young punks doomed by their habitual boasting, among other transgressions. Calabrese acquired these details by secretly recording his father, who was then cooling his heels in the pen, and from the tapes the feds slowly pieced together a decades-long history of the Outfit’s maneuverings in Chicago. When they had assembled enough data, they commenced a prosecution, the legal outcome of which was still unknown as Coen’s book went to press. One telling point of the government’s argument adverted to pop culture: “This is not The Sopranos; this is not The Godfather,” said one prosecutor. “This case is about real people and real victims.” So it was, and Coen does a creditable job of telling about their star-crossed lives.
A telling look inside the twisted world of organized crime, sure to interest those who follow mob mayhem.Pub Date: April 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-55652-781-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
When Kaysen was 18, in 1967, she was admitted to McLean Psychiatric Hospital outside Boston, where she would spend the next 18 months. Now, 25 years and two novels (Far Afield, 1990; Asa, As I Knew Him, 1987) later, she has come to terms with the experience- -as detailed in this searing account. First there was the suicide attempt, a halfhearted one because Kaysen made a phone call before popping the 50 aspirin, leaving enough time to pump out her stomach. The next year it was McLean, which she entered after one session with a bullying doctor, a total stranger. Still, she signed herself in: ``Reality was getting too dense...all my integrity seemed to lie in saying No.'' In the series of snapshots that follows, Kaysen writes as lucidly about the dark jumble inside her head as she does about the hospital routines, the staff, the patients. Her stay didn't coincide with those of various celebrities (Ray Charles, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell), but we are not likely to forget Susan, ``thin and yellow,'' who wrapped everything in sight in toilet paper, or Daisy, whose passions were laxatives and chicken. The staff is equally memorable: ``Our keepers. As for finders—well, we had to be our own finders.'' There was no way the therapists—those dispensers of dope (Thorazine, Stelazine, Mellaril, Librium, Valium)—might improve the patients' conditions: Recovery was in the lap of the gods (``I got better and Daisy didn't and I can't explain why''). When, all these years later, Kaysen reads her diagnosis (``Borderline Personality''), it means nothing when set alongside her descriptions of the ``parallel universe'' of the insane. It's an easy universe to enter, she assures us. We believe her. Every word counts in this brave, funny, moving reconstruction. For Kaysen, writing well has been the best revenge.
Pub Date: June 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-679-42366-4
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The acclaimed author of My Own Country (1996) turns his gaze inward to a pair of crises that hit even closer to home than the AIDS epidemic of which he wrote previously. Verghese took a teaching position at Texas Tech’s medical school, and it’s his arrival in the unfamiliar city of El Paso that triggers the events of his second book (parts of which appeared in the New Yorker). His marriage, already on the rocks in My Own Country, has collapsed utterly and the couple agree to a separation. In a new job in a new city, he finds himself more alone than he has ever been. But he becomes acquainted with a charming fourth-year student on his rotation, David, a former professional tennis player from Australia. Verghese, an ardent amateur himself, begins to play regularly with David and the two become close friends, indeed deeply dependent on each other. Gradually, the younger man begins to confide in his teacher and friend. David has a secret, known to most of the other students and staff at the teaching hospital but not to the recently arrived Verghese; he is a recovering drug addict whose presence at Tech is only possible if he maintains a rigorous schedule of AA meetings and urine tests. When David relapses and his life begins to spiral out of control, Verghese finds himself drawn into the young man’s troubles. As in his previous book, Verghese distinguishes himself by virtue not only of tremendous writing skill—he has a talented diagnostician’s observant eye and a gift for description—but also by his great humanity and humility. Verghese manages to recount the story of the failure of his marriage without recriminations and with a remarkable evenhandedness. Likewise, he tells David’s story honestly and movingly. Although it runs down a little in the last 50 pages or so, this is a compulsively readable and painful book, a work of compassion and intelligence.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-06-017405-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1998
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