A useful primer on the enduring nature of political machines and the slippery qualities of power.
An unadorned memoir of prosecuting political corruption in Brooklyn.
Writing with journalist Schmetterer, Vecchione (co-author: Friends of the Family: The Inside Story of the Mafia Cops Case, 2009) takes a straightforward approach to examining his career with the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Rackets Division, which he helmed from 2001 to 2013. In the prologue, he recalls his excitement at crime scenes as a neophyte in 1973: “I was hooked. This was the life for me.” Although the Rackets Division prosecuted many crimes as part of "the largest urban prosecution agency in the country,” in 2002, Vecchione began pursuing a cabal of judges who were soliciting bribes to fix cases, as well as the state politicians who appointed them. The initial convictions "struck Court Street like an earthquake" and led to wiretaps and indictments of powerful players, including Judge Gerald Garson and Democratic Party official Clarence Norman. “We felt that Garson was a product of machine politics in Brooklyn,” writes the author. Much of the narrative focuses on this labyrinthine case, as Vecchione details the nitty-gritty of proving such urban political scandals. Unsurprisingly, the reverberations in political circles were huge: "For a while,” he writes, “I was a pariah." Yet other officials quietly aided him, and the author emphasizes the arrogance of his targets, who turned down generous plea offers. In episodic chapters, Vecchione discusses other dramatic cases his division worked simultaneously, ranging from the NYPD’s notorious “Mafia cops,” who moonlighted as hit men, to a ghoulish crew that plundered bodies from funeral homes. Since the author identifies actual cases and malefactors, this career memoir benefits from a gritty verisimilitude. However, the author’s focus on courtroom maneuvering and investigative procedures can become tedious without greater context regarding New York’s labyrinthine government and history of corruption.
A useful primer on the enduring nature of political machines and the slippery qualities of power.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-06518-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.
In her first nonfiction book, novelist Grande (Dancing with Butterflies, 2009, etc.) delves into her family’s cycle of separation and reunification.
Raised in poverty so severe that spaghetti reminded her of the tapeworms endemic to children in her Mexican hometown, the author is her family’s only college graduate and writer, whose honors include an American Book Award and International Latino Book Award. Though she was too young to remember her father when he entered the United States illegally seeking money to improve life for his family, she idolized him from afar. However, she also blamed him for taking away her mother after he sent for her when the author was not yet 5 years old. Though she emulated her sister, she ultimately answered to herself, and both siblings constantly sought affirmation of their parents’ love, whether they were present or not. When one caused disappointment, the siblings focused their hopes on the other. These contradictions prove to be the narrator’s hallmarks, as she consistently displays a fierce willingness to ask tough questions, accept startling answers, and candidly render emotional and physical violence. Even as a girl, Grande understood the redemptive power of language to define—in the U.S., her name’s literal translation, “big queen,” led to ridicule from other children—and to complicate. In spelling class, when a teacher used the sentence “my mamá loves me” (mi mamá me ama), Grande decided to “rearrange the words so that they formed a question: ¿Me ama mi mamá? Does my mama love me?”
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6177-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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