A courtroom drama that, albeit without much drama, offers a realistic portrait of how big cases are pieced together.
A memoir from the federal prosecutor who took down the “Teflon Don” 30 years ago.
Gleeson recounts a youthful yearning to be an assistant U.S. attorney, a job denied him by an ambitious Rudy Giuliani in Manhattan. For his troubles, Gleeson, accepted in the jurisdiction just across the river in Brooklyn, was soon put on a case that took on the head of the Gambino crime family, John Gotti. “Even though I was a rookie, eight months earlier I’d been assigned to prosecute John Gotti on an entirely different set of charges,” Gleeson writes of one notorious hit, “so I’d already become part of the criminal world in which the murders outside Sparks were a seismic event.” That first case failed for reasons the author makes clear. Gotti’s second trial was on constantly shaky ground, built on insider informants who played both sides. “Just about everybody in Gotti’s crew had gone to jail at least once because of information Willie Boy had passed along,” writes Gleeson about one informant whose calculations didn’t play out to a happy ending. The prosecutors, working with the FBI, had to be careful not to tip off the mob lawyers to the identities of these informants or to let it be known that they were listening to their quarries’ conversations. Gleeson is a thorough writer, so much so that his chronicle drowns in detail, a boon for procedural adepts but less so for civilian true-crime buffs. Still, the author is admirably generous with credit where it’s due, especially the fact that without his successfully turning mobster Sammy Gravano into a federal witness, Gotti might well have walked a second time. Says Gravano, memorably, “I know I have to tell youse everything, and I will….I will not hold back, and I’m trusting you not to double-bang me.” Gleeson earns that trust, as this lumbering but nonetheless valuable narrative reveals.
A courtroom drama that, albeit without much drama, offers a realistic portrait of how big cases are pieced together.Pub Date: May 3, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982186-92-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.
The iconic model tells the story of her eventful life.
According to the acknowledgments, this memoir started as "a fifty-page poem and then grew into hundreds of pages of…more poetry." Readers will be glad that Anderson eventually turned to writing prose, since the well-told anecdotes and memorable character sketches are what make it a page-turner. The poetry (more accurately described as italicized notes-to-self with line breaks) remains strewn liberally through the pages, often summarizing the takeaway or the emotional impact of the events described: "I was / and still am / an exceptionally / easy target. / And, / I'm proud of that." This way of expressing herself is part of who she is, formed partly by her passion for Anaïs Nin and other writers; she is a serious maven of literature and the arts. The narrative gets off to a good start with Anderson’s nostalgic memories of her childhood in coastal Vancouver, raised by very young, very wild, and not very competent parents. Here and throughout the book, the author displays a remarkable lack of anger. She has faced abuse and mistreatment of many kinds over the decades, but she touches on the most appalling passages lightly—though not so lightly you don't feel the torment of the media attention on the events leading up to her divorce from Tommy Lee. Her trip to the pages of Playboy, which involved an escape from a violent fiance and sneaking across the border, is one of many jaw-dropping stories. In one interesting passage, Julian Assange's mother counsels Anderson to desexualize her image in order to be taken more seriously as an activist. She decided that “it was too late to turn back now”—that sexy is an inalienable part of who she is. Throughout her account of this kooky, messed-up, enviable, and often thrilling life, her humility (her sons "are true miracles, considering the gene pool") never fails her.
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023
ISBN: 9780063226562
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
SEEN & HEARD
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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