A raw and fascinating account of one mobster’s daily activities and career.
Veteran New York reporters tell the story of a Mafia kingpin’s rise to power, his decision to leave the mob and his role in testifying against his former partners in crime.
Leading Mafia authority Capeci (Wiseguys Say the Darndest Things: The Quotable Mafia, 2004, etc.) and former New York Daily News reporter Robbins (Investigative Reporting/CUNY School of Journalism) use hours of interviews with Al D’Arco to recount his progression toward becoming the Lucchese crime family’s acting boss in 1990. D’Arco grew up the son of an Italian immigrant in New York’s Little Italy during the 1940s, where the Mafia was like a “forest” surrounding him. With neighbors, friends and family in the “Life,” D’Arco assumed it was just a matter of time before he joined one of New York’s five families. After a short stint in the Army during the Korean War, D’Arco received mentorship from a cousin who was a made member of the Mafia, and he associated with a Lucchese family crew under the leadership of the notorious Paul Vario (featured in the book Wiseguys and the movie Goodfellas). Inheriting his father’s determined work ethic, D’Arco put his energy toward a successful career in the Mafia, including having his oldest son follow in his trade. D’Arco’s labors bore fruit when the Lucchese family’s boss and underboss were forced to go on the lam, making him the organization’s acting boss. As a boss, he attempted to reconcile his sense of honor with the crimes he was pushed to commit. When members of the crime family conspired to kill him, his personal code was tested further with his decision to turn to the FBI and testify against his former associates. While tension grows with D’Arco’s decision to leave the Life, the most interesting portions of the book follow the colorful cast of characters he encountered during his Mafia career.
A raw and fascinating account of one mobster’s daily activities and career.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-00686-8
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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