First-person recital by a former New York City detective who was an active felon with Mafia connections. Manca was raised by his grandfather, an old-style ``made'' man. When Frank LoCicero emigrated from Palermo, he reestablished his friendship with Lucky Luciano, and drilled young Manca in omerta—the code of silence—and other mob ethics. At 18, hoping to escape his family destiny, Manca joined the NYPD. Straight life was brief. On his first night in a prowl car, Manca's partner kept stopping to go into a slummy building. Angry that he was being cut out of the action, Manca followed him and found the cop checking up on a whorehouse he ran. Fourteen months later, Manca was promoted to detective with the help of mobster Carmine DeSapio's men in the Department. Finally getting some scope to operate, he put the arm on bookies, sold watered-down affidavits to his arrestees, burglarized Wall Street offices, and mugged pimps—enough action to have a new house, a cherry Buick, racks of hand-tailored suits, and regular trips to Vegas. Flagrant as he was, the brass ignored him- -they were all on the pad, too. He was kicked out of the Department when he and his civilian partner were arrested for stealing multiple Cadillacs; Manca then became a ``half-wise guy,'' sometimes free-lancing, sometimes working with the mob. His first undertaking was playing phony detective to frame an immigrant doctor, putting the squeeze on him for $30,000. Soon, he was flimflamming banks in Queens, and had scammed three Vegas casinos for $200,000 in one weekend. The aesthetic details of Manca's various hustles are given careful (and fascinating) exposition. Caught passing stolen traveler's checks, he was given three years, ratted out the mob, and was placed in the Witness Protection Program. An engrossing evocation of the pre-Knapp Commission NYPD, the voice of a sociopathic petty hood, and the siren song of greed. A must-have for cop-tale collectors.
Pub Date: Sept. 19, 1991
ISBN: 0-688-09466-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1991
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
© 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.
