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
A quirky wonder of a book.
A Peabody Award–winning NPR science reporter chronicles the life of a turn-of-the-century scientist and how her quest led to significant revelations about the meaning of order, chaos, and her own existence.
Miller began doing research on David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) to understand how he had managed to carry on after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his work. A taxonomist who is credited with discovering “a full fifth of fish known to man in his day,” Jordan had amassed an unparalleled collection of ichthyological specimens. Gathering up all the fish he could save, Jordan sewed the nameplates that had been on the destroyed jars directly onto the fish. His perseverance intrigued the author, who also discusses the struggles she underwent after her affair with a woman ended a heterosexual relationship. Born into an upstate New York farm family, Jordan attended Cornell and then became an itinerant scholar and field researcher until he landed at Indiana University, where his first ichthyological collection was destroyed by lightning. In between this catastrophe and others involving family members’ deaths, he reconstructed his collection. Later, he was appointed as the founding president of Stanford, where he evolved into a Machiavellian figure who trampled on colleagues and sang the praises of eugenics. Miller concludes that Jordan displayed the characteristics of someone who relied on “positive illusions” to rebound from disaster and that his stand on eugenics came from a belief in “a divine hierarchy from bacteria to humans that point[ed]…toward better.” Considering recent research that negates biological hierarchies, the author then suggests that Jordan’s beloved taxonomic category—fish—does not exist. Part biography, part science report, and part meditation on how the chaos that caused Miller’s existential misery could also bring self-acceptance and a loving wife, this unique book is an ingenious celebration of diversity and the mysterious order that underlies all existence.
A quirky wonder of a book.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6027-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
