When the feds nailed John Gotti earlier this year, they decapitated a crime syndicate that, according to Davis (Mafia Kingfish, 1988, etc.), numbers perhaps 500 ``soldiers'' and thousands of associates, and nets at least $500 million annually. How the Gambino crime family reached this dark pinnacle makes, in Davis's hands, for a gripping true-crime history. As in his other dynastic studies (The Kennedys, 1984, etc.), Davis doesn't dig out new data here so much as collate others' research, spiced with his own firsthand anecdotes. Though the roots of the Gambinos, he explains, reach back to the Neapolitan and Sicilian mobs of the early 1900's, the crime family's story really begins in 1931, when Lucky Luciano reorganized New York's underworld and named one Vincent Mangano to head the most powerful faction, or family. In 1951, Mangano was killed, probably by Murder Inc. head Albert Anastasia, who took over as family boss; Anastasia's underboss was Carlo Gambino, who, in 1957, engineered his chief's murder and became boss in turn, giving the family its name. Davis focuses on the reigns of Gambino, the ultimate mob businessman, bland but ruthless; his successor, Paul Castellano, who ruled like a caesar from his Staten Island mansion; and Gotti. The author covers every rumor and fact about the Gambinos (e.g., that J. Edgar Hoover kept hands off organized crime because he got betting tips from Gambino Çminence grise Frank Costello). Davis describes his encounters in Naples with the exiled Luciano (``a small man with narrow sloping shoulders and a repulsive face''); offers an eyewitness account of the recent Gotti trial; and explains the economic workings of the family in full. He also—in the book's primary flaw—envelopes his text in moral thunder (Carlo Gambino was ``a monstrous parasite,'' etc.). An authoritative overview of the nation's premier criminal organization, and of the greed and hubris that have toppled its leaders time and again. (Photos—16 pp.—not seen.)
Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-016357-7
Page Count: 464
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Told with mettle and intelligence, Sebold’s story of fierce determination to wrest back her life from her rapist will...
A stunningly crafted and unsparing account of the author’s rape as a college freshman and what it took to win her case in court.
In 1981, Sebold was brutally raped on her college campus, at Syracuse University. Sebold, a New York Times Magazinecontributor, now in her 30s, reconstructs the rape and the year following in which her assailant was brought to trial and found guilty. When, months after the rape, she confided in her fiction professor, Tobias Wolff, he advised: “Try, if you can, to remember everything.” Sebold heeded his words, and the result is a memoir that reads like detective fiction, replete with police jargon, economical characterization, and film-like scene construction. Part of Sebold’s ironic luck, besides the fact that she wasn’t killed, was that she was a virgin prior to the rape, she was wearing bulky clothing, and her rapist beat her, leaving unmistakable evidence of violence. Sebold casts a cool eye on these facts: “The cosmetics of rape are central to proving any case.” Sebold critiques the sexism and misconceptions surrounding rape with neither rhetoric nor apology; she lets her experience speak for itself. Her family, her friends, her campus community are all shaken by the brutality she survived, yet Sebold finds herself feeling more affinity with police officers she meets, as it was “in [their] world where this hideous thing had happened to me. A world of violent crime.” Just when Sebold believes she might surface from this world, a close friend is raped and the haunting continues. The last section, “Aftermath,” has an unavoidable tacked-on-at-the-end feel, as Sebold crams over a decade’s worth of coping and healing into a short chapter.
Told with mettle and intelligence, Sebold’s story of fierce determination to wrest back her life from her rapist will inspire and challenge.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-85782-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Jan. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
The Atlanta child murders comprise the starting point for this virtuoso polemic against racism in America. Baldwin writes bluntly: "Others may see American progress in economic, racial and social affairs—I do not." It is this distinctive Baldwinian voice of outrage that powers his penetrating examination of why color still divides America. Baldwin thinks that Wayne Williams, the black man accused of the murders of 28 black children over a 22-month period, was railroaded. No matter that his conviction was presided over by a black judge in a Southern city governed by a black mayor. Williams was prosecuted under intense pressure to close a case that might tarnish Atlanta's reputation as a "city too busy to hate." A black administration's presence, says Baldwin, did not change the fact that the legal system served the commercial interests of a booming Southern city. To consider this only as an issue of class, contends Baldwin, is a denial by blacks and whites alike of America's legacy of slavery. He writes that ". . .this country, in toto, from Atlanta to Boston, to Texas to California, is not so much a vicious racial caldron—many, if not most countries are that—as a paranoid color wheel." By sketching the emergence of the black middle class and its complicity in maintaining the "white" rules, and the white flight from the city to the suburbs—leaving a mostly black, impoverished city. Baldwin describes how the wheel goes round. And its consequence remains: How do you become "white" enough to get up and out of the ghetto? Ironically, it was the rage of the parents of the murdered children that set Atlanta's color wheel spinning. Once they provoked national attention, according to Baldwin, the pressure to solve the crimes began. Until then, no one was ". . .compelled to hear the needs of a captive population."Baldwin delivers his judgment in cranky, idiosyncratic exposition that links the state of race relations with the prosecution of Williams. He details the official maneuvering that brought Williams to trial and the extraordinary legal decision to charge him with the murders of two black men, but permit the accusations and evidence of all the children's murders to be discussed at his trial. Baldwin has penetrated a sensational crime with his considerable novelist's skill for seeing things the rest of us don't. In the process, he's delivered a stinging indictment of racial stagnation.
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1985
ISBN: 1568495757
Page Count: -
Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1985
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 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.
