A serviceable, well-researched examination of a little-known corner of the NYPD’s past.
History of a little-known unit within the New York Police Department made up of Italians who battled organized crime.
In the early 1900s, many members of the NYPD looked down on Italian immigrants, as journalist Moses documents at several points. However, Joseph Petrosino, the first commander of the Italian squad, analyzed the data and concluded that “97 percent of Italian immigrants were law-abiding and hardworking,” and their presence in criminal statistics was no greater than that of any other ethnic group. Appointed to the post by Theodore Roosevelt, then the commissioner of police for New York, Petrosino went up against the first glimmerings of the Mafia in the city. He was assassinated in Sicily, where he was on the hunt for mobsters, in 1909, succeeded by an Irish department head who expanded the squad and who learned along the way that Petrosino had been killed at the orders of a peripheral criminal the detective had shamed with a public beating. Still, Petrosino was enshrined as “the quintessential police officer and New Yorker.” Michael Fiaschetti, another Italian-born officer, eventually headed the squad, fighting the Black Hand and other criminal organizations while doing plenty of self-promotion, which, all the same, didn’t keep him from being demoted for roughing up a defense attorney. The Italian Squad was, as Moses notes, “mythologized” from the start, but Fiaschetti was a master of “inflating his reputation,” so the facts are not easy to come by. Though the narrative isn’t quite as riveting as a well-rendered crime procedural, the author does a solid job digging through the files to get at them, noting that while the squad ultimately didn’t make much of a dent in controlling organized crime—the Mafia flourished in the 1920s and ’30s—it did serve as “a bridge for an alienated immigrant community” that was all too often reluctant to help the police.
A serviceable, well-researched examination of a little-known corner of the NYPD’s past.Pub Date: June 3, 2023
ISBN: 9781479814190
Page Count: 304
Publisher: New York Univ.
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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 fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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