Saviano’s account is sometimes florid—the consequence of sending a poet to do a journalist’s work—but endlessly eye-opening...
Remember when the Mob was merely corrupt, savage and murderous? It’s still all those things, but, as Neapolitan philosopher Saviano writes, it’s also become a globalized multinational corporation with a long reach.
“The Camorra,” laments Saviano, “is made up of groups that suck like voracious lice, thus hindering all economic development, and others that operate as instant innovators, pushing their businesses to new heights of development and trade.” Operating on the vicious margins, but also in the space that government and development agencies might otherwise occupy, the Neapolitan crime syndicates, with their “flexible, federalist structure,” are far more populous than the Calabrian ’Ndrangheta or the Sicilian Mafia and cast a wider net. They set up companies, pull down others, band together and pull apart. Far from the thugs who conspired in postwar Italy to smuggle cigarettes in from Montenegro without paying taxes, they have their fingers in every aspect of the consumer economy, for “consumer goods have replaced the nicotine habit as the new contraband.” Say “consumer goods,” and you immediately implicate the Chinese, whose own organized crime groups care little about how their wares enter the European market so long as they get there. (The American market, too—buy an Italian-designer anything, and the chances are good that it was made in China.) By Saviano’s calculation, 1.6 million tons of Chinese goods enter the port of Naples legally, but at least another million tons “pass through without leaving a trace.” The Chinese themselves do—visit a morgue in Naples, and the Asian bodies—in the wrong place at the wrong time—are everywhere. Saviano also offers an interesting bonus: instructions on gun use. As one older Camorrista complains, “Ever since Tarantino, these guys don’t know the right way to shoot!”
Saviano’s account is sometimes florid—the consequence of sending a poet to do a journalist’s work—but endlessly eye-opening and sobering.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-374-16527-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
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
"There's got to be something wrong with somebody who'd do a thing like that." This is Perry Edward Smith, talking about himself. "Deal me out, baby...I'm a normal." This is Richard Eugene Hickock, talking about himself. They're as sick a pair as Leopold and Loeb and together they killed a mother, a father, a pretty 17-year-old and her brother, none of whom they'd seen before, in cold blood. A couple of days before they had bought a 100 foot rope to garrote them—enough for ten people if necessary. This small pogrom took place in Holcomb, Kansas, a lonesome town on a flat, limitless landscape: a depot, a store, a cafe, two filling stations, 270 inhabitants. The natives refer to it as "out there." It occurred in 1959 and Capote has spent five years, almost all of the time which has since elapsed, in following up this crime which made no sense, had no motive, left few clues—just a footprint and a remembered conversation. Capote's alternating dossier Shifts from the victims, the Clutter family, to the boy who had loved Nancy Clutter, and her best friend, to the neighbors, and to the recently paroled perpetrators: Perry, with a stunted child's legs and a changeling's face, and Dick, who had one squinting eye but a "smile that works." They had been cellmates at the Kansas State Penitentiary where another prisoner had told them about the Clutters—he'd hired out once on Mr. Clutter's farm and thought that Mr. Clutter was perhaps rich. And this is the lead which finally broke the case after Perry and Dick had drifted down to Mexico, back to the midwest, been seen in Kansas City, and were finally picked up in Las Vegas. The last, even more terrible chapters, deal with their confessions, the law man who wanted to see them hanged, back to back, the trial begun in 1960, the post-ponements of the execution, and finally the walk to "The Corner" and Perry's soft-spoken words—"It would be meaningless to apologize for what I did. Even inappropriate. But I do. I apologize." It's a magnificent job—this American tragedy—with the incomparable Capote touches throughout. There may never have been a perfect crime, but if there ever has been a perfect reconstruction of one, surely this must be it.
Pub Date: Jan. 7, 1965
ISBN: 0375507906
Page Count: 343
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1965
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