It’s often difficult—if not downright overwhelming—to keep track of the many players in this story, but aficionados of Mafia...
ABC news correspondent Lance (Triple Cross: How bin Laden's Master Spy Penetrated the CIA, the Green Berets, and the FBI, 2009) delivers an exhaustive examination into the life and crimes of Mafia capo Gregory Scarpa Sr. and his questionable decadeslong relationship with the FBI.
The author reveals that Scarpa, a notoriously violent killer, received tens of thousands of dollars from the FBI for feeding them information that would help indict several of his rival gangsters. Yet despite his claims that he had killed more than 50 people, Scarpa never spent more than 30 days in jail. In addition, writes Lance, Scarpa was known to J. Edgar Hoover and was recruited to assist the Feds when their methods failed—most notably, in the “interrogation” of a Mississippi Ku Klux Klan member who was involved in the murder of three civil rights workers in 1964. But Lance is most interested in the relationship that developed between Scarpa and his handler, Agent Lindley DeVecchio. He asserts that over many years, DeVecchio supplied classified information to Scarpa, which in turn led to the deaths of several of Scarpa’s adversaries. DeVecchio was eventually indicted on multiple counts of murder, although the case was dropped before the trial concluded. Lance delves into the details of the trial through newly released court records to prove DeVecchio’s involvement in Scarpa’s nefarious activities. The book is extensively researched, using personal interviews, letters, court documents and declassified FBI files. At more than 600 pages, it could use some editing, however, especially toward the end, when Lance attempts to connect the story of Scarpa and DeVecchio to larger issues of international terrorism.
It’s often difficult—if not downright overwhelming—to keep track of the many players in this story, but aficionados of Mafia history and those concerned with FBI corruption will find this thorough investigation satisfying.Pub Date: July 2, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-145534-6
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2013
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 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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