Scholarly yet lively account of the legendary Prohibition- era gangster. Schoenberg (Geneen, 1984) chronicles Alphonsus Capone's Brooklyn origins; provides a microscopically detailed record of the gangsters, turf, and politicians of the decade of Capone's ascendancy in Chicago; and describes Capone's post-penitentiary retirement to Florida, where the dreaded gangster—infected with tertiary syphilis—spent his last years playing cards and fishing in the enforced calm thought necessary for syphilis victims. Schoenberg's closely focused annals provide an interesting view of the lesser-known young Capone, born in 1899 to an immigrant family. As a teenager, he was a member of the infamous Five Points gang and, by age 16, was working for Brooklyn boss Frankie Yale, serving an apprenticeship in extortion along the banks of the Gowanus Canal. Fleeing to Chicago after nearly beating to death an Irish member of the rival White Hand gang, the 21-year old Capone signed on with business-minded bootlegger and pimp John Torrio, who, besides dividing the Chicago turf with other mobsters such as the flower-loving Deany O'Banion, was expanding his operation into the middle-class suburbs. Capone mastered his volcanic temper, and, under the tutelage of the bland and friendly Torrio—whose signature remark was, ``We don't want any trouble''—took elocution lessons and became perhaps the first gangster to manipulate public relations, cooperating fully with photographers and making himself always available to reporters. At age 26, Capone bought the entire business from Torrio, who decided to return to Italy after being shot in the war that erupted after O'Banion's murder. Avoids the mythologizing of much Capone material, and likely to endure as a standard reference. (Eight pages of b&w photographs, maps—not seen.)
Pub Date: Aug. 17, 1992
ISBN: 0-688-08941-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
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
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
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