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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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