An audacious memoir unveiling the machinations of the mob.
A decade of turmoil in the life of a Mafia associate, back when the New York underworld ruled supreme.
Polisi’s brassy guided tour of his time as a member of the Colombo and Gambino crime families is consistently accented by burgeoning “professional” relationships with kingpins like John Gotti, who, when the pair met in 1972, was a swaggering, self-assured “gangster’s gangster” thirsty for action. It was a pivotal year for the New York mob’s five families, as The Godfather launched and the American Mafia ascended in both notoriety and affluence. By his early 20s, the Brooklyn-born Polisi was married and had two sons, as well as a lengthy rap sheet and the moniker of “Crazy Sal.” Early on in the author’s fearless chronicle, the mobster unabashedly concedes to being a “street guy,” as he and young Gambino sidekick Foxy Jerothe became intoxicated by the thrill of robbing banks, orchestrating heists, loan-sharking, dodging bullets and gambling at the Colombo family base camp: the renowned Sinatra Club in Queens. Polisi also inserts frequently dark historical anecdotes and heady personal confessions of his unrepentant philandering on his doting wife Angela and a laundry list of illicit escapades from the ’70s through the mid-’80s. In the evocative final chapters, Polisi details how he eventually flipped and became a protected witness in Gotti’s criminal proceedings, a move that further contributed to the downfall and demise of the mob’s “brotherhood of hoodlums.”
An audacious memoir unveiling the machinations of the mob.Pub Date: July 24, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-4287-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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