An exciting romp through racketeering.
Three nice Jewish boys make good in this Prohibition-era gangster saga.
If you’re Jewish and live in New York in the early 20th century, there’s no way an anti-Semitic power structure is going to let you get ahead. Or so it seems to young Irving Lowenstein. Despite graduating at the top of his Columbia University Law School class, he figures that his illicit gambling operation is his best ticket out of the Delancey Street ghetto. Irving joins forces with Mendy Goldblatt, a gang leader with an animus against WASP swells (sample monologue: “No way you can come in this club and piss on a bunch of Jews and dagoes from the Lower East Side just because your old man owns a few steel mills and you’re a Princeton boy”). Completing the trio is Lou Kravitz, who, after his Wharton MBA lands him nothing but a dead-end job as a Wall Street investment banker, realizes that organized crime is the only venue where talent is fairly rewarded. Together, the three strivers expand their criminal empire to include union rackets, bootlegging and swank speakeasies–where the reader bumps into the likes of Mary Pickford and Flo Ziegfeld–even as they retain their mensch-hood by helping widows, orphans and rabbis and keeping heroin out of the neighborhood. Fenton throws in floozies and sardonic violence–Mendy fastidiously waits for Shabbas sunset before gunning down one Jew-baiting Irish thug–but he is drawn more to his heroes’ commercial acumen, especially their complex dealings with Canadian distilleries. Indeed, there’s not much shape to the plot besides the steady burgeoning of their wealth and clout. The author’s somewhat shopworn portrayal of gangsterism as an immigrant business success story against a bigoted Establishment makes little sense, since his protagonists have well-paying legitimate careers open to them. Still, Fenton mounts an entertaining, if quite broad, burlesque–“Oy, vey, the police are at the door!”–of Jewish life and the New York underworld during the Jazz Age.
An exciting romp through racketeering.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-60145-347-1
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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