A Manhattan cop breaks family tradition—his uncles, cousin, father, and grandfather all were members of the Gambino crime family—and is accused of selling his shield after a highly decorated career. When his cousin Jim-Jim and his uncle Jimmy were rubbed out for a scam that embarrassed the Gambino bosses, Eppolito—a highly decorated NYPD legend who made no effort to hide his contempt for the ``three P's: perps, pussies, and pencil-pushing prigs''—felt his East Flatbush roots stir. Here, writing with the help of Drury (coauthor, Incident at Howard Beach, 1989, etc.), Eppolito dwells long on his thicker-than-blood Italian upbringing in the 50's—street festivals, marbled funeral parlors, the Grand Mark Tavern in Bensonhurst (``sit-down central'' for wiseguys), and, particularly, the beatings by his father, pounding home the Neapolitan ethos of honor and respect. After his father's death, Eppolito joined the NYPD and became a can-do cop who divided humanity into two categories: those who deserved respect, and those beneath contempt. Here, he proudly describes an attack with buddy cops on a ``group of junkies, Rastafarians'' in Prospect Park. Putting pantyhose over his face, Eppolito broke wrists, legs, and arms, and crippled a man for life. For one stick-up suspect, the author invented a new interrogation technique: After punching ``Bugs forty times in the head,'' Eppolito filled a bucket with hot, fuming ammonia and slammed the man's face in it. In 1978, Internal Affairs made a case against the cop for passing police intelligence to Rosario Gambino (nephew of Carlo, capo da tutti capi). Eppolito was acquitted but retired from the force shortly afterward when Martin Scorsese offered him a part in Goodfellas. Flat characterizations with some sharp N.Y.C. detail (``Italian tuxedo—that's the white, sleeveless T-shirt''): mostly for Mafia/NYPD buffs. (Photos—16 pages of b&w—not seen.)
Pub Date: June 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-671-74221-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1992
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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