Intoxicated with words, including those he crafts himself, Tosches (In the Hand of Dante, 2002, etc.) offers deft ruminations on large matters under cover of the biography of a gangster.
A foxy writer, Tosches starts at the beginning: Genesis. First, with the word, is Hebrew etymology, then the stories of Gilgamesh, Baal, Joshua, Ishtar (aka “Esther”) and, eventually, on to Louis the Lump, Big Tim Sullivan, assorted chorines, bimbos and Rudy Giuliani (who, like Adolf Hitler, wickedly outlawed smoking). Not forgotten are U.S. Grant, Heinrich Heine, Boss Tweed and many colorful denizens of New York’s notorious Five Points. All this is wrapped around the story of Arnold Rothstein, the Jewish-American Moriarty, mentor to Legs Diamond, banker to the drug trade, inspiration to Runyon and Fitzgerald and putative fixer of the 1919 World Series. Regarding the fix, Tosches says it ain’t so. He’s generally dubious about most received information. “I’m telling you,” says Tosches, “exactly what I told my ex-wife: Believe nothing unless you hear it from me.” Arnold’s father, “Abe the Just,” was less saintly than credited as being, he thinks. (One recent text is dissed, though not cited, for buying that notion, while the same book, this time cited, is called “enticing” on the topic of Rothstein’s unsolved murder.) The debunking is most liberally spread as the skein of tangled connections becomes as complex as string theory. Assiduous research, the author complains, “has brought me nothing but the worsening of my eyesight and the waste of years of my life. And I did it all for you.” Here are extracts from newspaper accounts of Rothstein’s death, the coroner’s report, surrogate’s hearings, and miscellaneous matter. But Tosches gives us less, frankly, on the gangster’s life than on world history with Rothstein somehow cast in the role of Everyman. The result is frequently flamboyant, often lively, always diverting.
Tosches’s Theory of Everything, disguised as biography: energetic, histrionic, polemical and heaps of fun.Pub Date: May 3, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-621118-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
Categories: CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | TRUE CRIME
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"There's got to be something wrong with somebody who'd do a thing like that." This is Perry Edward Smith, talking about himself. "Deal me out, baby...I'm a normal." This is Richard Eugene Hickock, talking about himself. They're as sick a pair as Leopold and Loeb and together they killed a mother, a father, a pretty 17-year-old and her brother, none of whom they'd seen before, in cold blood. A couple of days before they had bought a 100 foot rope to garrote them—enough for ten people if necessary. This small pogrom took place in Holcomb, Kansas, a lonesome town on a flat, limitless landscape: a depot, a store, a cafe, two filling stations, 270 inhabitants. The natives refer to it as "out there." It occurred in 1959 and Capote has spent five years, almost all of the time which has since elapsed, in following up this crime which made no sense, had no motive, left few clues—just a footprint and a remembered conversation. Capote's alternating dossier Shifts from the victims, the Clutter family, to the boy who had loved Nancy Clutter, and her best friend, to the neighbors, and to the recently paroled perpetrators: Perry, with a stunted child's legs and a changeling's face, and Dick, who had one squinting eye but a "smile that works." They had been cellmates at the Kansas State Penitentiary where another prisoner had told them about the Clutters—he'd hired out once on Mr. Clutter's farm and thought that Mr. Clutter was perhaps rich. And this is the lead which finally broke the case after Perry and Dick had drifted down to Mexico, back to the midwest, been seen in Kansas City, and were finally picked up in Las Vegas. The last, even more terrible chapters, deal with their confessions, the law man who wanted to see them hanged, back to back, the trial begun in 1960, the post-ponements of the execution, and finally the walk to "The Corner" and Perry's soft-spoken words—"It would be meaningless to apologize for what I did. Even inappropriate. But I do. I apologize." It's a magnificent job—this American tragedy—with the incomparable Capote touches throughout. There may never have been a perfect crime, but if there ever has been a perfect reconstruction of one, surely this must be it.
Pub Date: Jan. 7, 1965
ISBN: 0375507906
Page Count: 343
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1965
Categories: TRUE CRIME
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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