An entertaining tale ripped from the headlines of Jazz Age America.
Crimes and misdemeanors animate a spirited history.
Attracted once again to sin and subversion, Abbott (Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War, 2014, etc.) sets her lively new tale during Prohibition, when George Remus, a teetotaling lawyer–turned-bootlegger, amassed an empire so large that even he could not keep count of the distilleries and drug companies—liquor could be sold legally with a doctor’s prescription—that yielded his fortune. Deposits to his savings accounts “averaged $50,000 a day, in an era when the average salary was $1,400 a year,” Abbott reveals. “The money came in so fast that Remus couldn’t deposit it all, forcing him to carry as much as $100,000 in his pockets at any given time.” He indulged in real estate, automobiles, and antiques, and his attractive young wife shopped with abandon, buying items such as solid gold service plates, diamonds, and furs. The family’s mansion was decorated with Persian rugs, European oil paintings, and, in the parlor, a solid gold piano. Their parties were notoriously extravagant: One New Year’s Eve, guests received diamonds and gold as party favors. With politicians, legislators, city police, and Prohibition officers taking bribes of cash and liquor, Remus felt confidently above the law. However, he did not account for the dogged perseverance of Mabel Walker Willebrandt, an ambitious Department of Justice prosecutor determined to enforce the 18th Amendment. With the help of a team of agents known as Mabelmen, she succeeded, landing Remus in jail, where, at one point, he had a maid to cook and serve meals for him, fellow prisoners, and select visitors. Remus would be a colorful subject just on the basis of his flagrant bootlegging, but his malfeasance came to include something much more serious: murder. Drawing on government files, archives, newspaper articles, and trial transcripts—one of which was more than 5,000 pages long—Abbott recounts in tense, vivid detail Remus’ entanglement in intrigue, betrayal, madness, and violence.
An entertaining tale ripped from the headlines of Jazz Age America.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-451-49862-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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