The consummately unglamourous life and times of a Mafia moll turned informant, by the author of Missing Beauty (1988). As a teenager on New York's Lower East Side, Arlyne Weiss dressed provocatively, flirted brazenly, and had sex with anyone who struck her as enticingly dangerous. Although her family was Jewish and she had affairs with cronies of her father (like Nate, whom she found one night with a bullet in his head), she preferred Italians, usually small-time gangsters, who lived from one shady deal to the next. Weiss married furrier Norman Brickman and became pregnant, but they parted before the baby was born. After a stint as a call girl that led to a violent gang rape, she met and became obsessed with a minor-league hood associated with the Genovese family. Weiss got involved in his numbers operation, and when they were busted, she accepted the cops' invitation to inform. Early on, she spilled just random wise-guy gossip, but soon lots of law- enforcement agencies (the FBI, the DEA) got in on the act. Weiss began wearing a wire, going after loan sharks and drug-dealers, cleverly inducing them to implicate themselves on tape, feeling no qualms about betraying her former friends. She never was able to get anything on John Gotti, but she testified at the racketeering trial of godfather Carmine Persico, and although she was humiliated on the stand, he and his codefendants were convicted. There's a voyeuristic charge to peering into this sordid world as Weiss careens from teenage sex sprees to haphazard crime schemes to her ultimate isolation, her only child, a heroine addict, having died of AIDS. Carpenter adeptly lays out a tremendous amount of information, but in the end it's the bleakness of the picture that overwhelms: the sexism, small-mindedness, and addiction to excitement that characterize life in the mob. (Sixteen-page b&w photo insert—not seen.)
Pub Date: March 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-671-68345-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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