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
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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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