Vigorous storytelling at the intersection of sports and crime history.
An intriguing, long-overlooked tale from the annals of early professional football.
Sid Luckman (1916-1998), writes Rosen (Such Good Girls: The Journey of the Holocaust’s Hidden Child Survivors, 2014, etc.), “once led the most feared team in the National Football League—the ‘Monsters of the Midway’—to five national championship appearances and four titles in seven years,” a gridiron hero lionized by a generation but then, it seems, definitively forgotten. In opening, the author wonders why, noting that Luckman, a quarterback who did much to popularize the pro game, had never before been the subject of a biography. Luckman wasn’t much to sing his own praises, granted, but there was also something that he wanted to distance himself from—namely, his father’s involvement in the Jewish/Italian crime syndicate called Murder, Inc., involvement that included the murder of his brother-in-law and a long stretch in prison. “He chose to spare his loved ones the burden he was used to carrying almost alone,” writes Rosen, and so Luckman did, even if the game he played was not without its criminal aspects, mostly the gambling that surrounded it. As the author notes, Luckman’s name did once “show up in one inconvenient place”: the notebook kept by a mobster who specialized in sports gambling. Luckman did his best to play through the personal turmoil, throwing 135 touchdown passes in his first 10 seasons and becoming a master of the T formation but then fading away in the 1950s. There are many moving parts to the story, and Rosen does a good job of keeping the narrative clear and moving smoothly. One of the more complex of those parts highlights the political uses the Manhattan district attorney, Thomas Dewey, made of the prosecution of Murder, Inc.’s chiefs, who fell one by one.
Vigorous storytelling at the intersection of sports and crime history.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2944-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2019
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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