A well-padded but quite readable history of Tony Accardo, the gangster who got his start as Al Capone's bodyguard and rose to rule over the Chicago mob until his death of natural causes in 1992. Roemer (The Enforcer, 1994, etc.), a 30-year FBI man who was senior agent of the Organized Crime Squad, admits to a ``grudging respect'' for Accardo, who ``did his job with some class'' and, in Chicago at least, kept ``the mob away from families and from the drug trade.'' Capone nicknamed his young henchman ``Joe Batters'' after he clubbed two rivals to death with baseball bat. A protÇgÇ of the notorious Machine Gun Jack McGurn, Accardo, according to Roemer, was with McGurn at the St. Valentine's Day Massacre in 1928. He bases that contention and a lot of his information on the FBI wiretaps and ``bugs'' on organized crime figures in the 1950s and 1960s. After Capone went to prison in 1931 and following the 1943 suicide of Frank Nitti and the indictment for extortion of several gangland leaders, Accardo assumed control of the so-called Chicago Outfit. Except for his infamous nontestimony at the 1950 Kefauver hearings, Accardo kept a fairly low profile. He methodically expanded mob operations into the black ghettos of his city and took over rackets and casinos in Florida and Las Vegas. In 1957, having ``become the very best ever'' and achieving ``everything a mob boss could accomplish,'' Accardo handed over the day-to-day supervision of gang activities to flashy Sam Giancana. Roemer believes that Accardo remained the final authority on all major business and personnel decisionsincluding ``contracts''until his dying day. A big, sprawled-out account that serves more as anecdotal history of organized crime than it does as biography. (photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 24, 1995
ISBN: 1-55611-467-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Donald Fine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1995
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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