For Mafia buffs, a sure thing—though the denouement may be the most shocking thing about this labored book.
Mix The Godfather with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and you’ve got this routine true-crime study of one of the most coldblooded murderers in history.
Tommy Pitera was a gangly kid who was picked on in his Brooklyn schoolyard by bullies who “made fun of his voice, his clothes, his walk.” That was a bad thing to do, writes mayhem maestro Carlo (Gaspipe: Confessions of a Mafia Boss, 2008, etc.). The bullies may have lived to tell the tale, but little Pitera grew up dreaming of revenge, studying martial arts and weaponry and developing an unhealthy fascination with the various ways in which the human body can be deconstructed. Fast-forward a decade, and Pitera is one of the most frightening soldiers working for the Bonanno crime family, top dogs in “the largest concentration of Mafia members in the world…ground zero for the American La Cosa Nostra.” Pitera didn’t just kill at his bosses’ behest; he gleefully chopped up his victims into little pieces and hid the bits away in wildlife refuges, trash dumps and abandoned lots. Throughout Carlo’s account, Pitera slaughters and butchers, killing mostly within the ranks of those for whom being offed is an occupational hazard, but then crossing the line, at least in the complicated etiquette of mobsters, by doing in a badly behaved party doll: “The killing of a woman . . . that way—all cut up like that—was something out of the ordinary even for them; beyond the pale, even for them.” Pitera’s downfall came courtesy of a particularly hardworking federal agent who is about the only good guy in this story. Carlo misses no opportunity to work in a cliché, and some of his connections don’t quite cohere (what Pearl S. Buck has to do with Pitera’s psychopathy is anyone’s guess), but the tale, however clumsily told, has gruesome power enough to hold the reader’s attention.
For Mafia buffs, a sure thing—though the denouement may be the most shocking thing about this labored book.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-174465-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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