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
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
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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