Occasionally interesting, but not for the reasons the title indicates.
The line between organized crime and local politics in Reconstruction-era New Orleans is blurred in this thoroughly researched but sloppily presented historical biography.
Those with a passing interest in the history of New Orleans or the history of organized crime will be familiar with the 1891 murder of New Orleans police chief David Hennessey by a group of Sicilian immigrants. Irate at the verdict–acquitted of all charges–a gang of New Orleanians hunted down the defendants and lynched them. Many consider the event the first major Mafia incident in the United States. Hunt and Sheldon take on this well-worn topic from a slightly different angle–through the life of J.P. Macheca, a prominent Sicilian fruit merchant and one of the murdered defendants (as well as Sheldon’s ancestor). Through a combination of historical records and family lore, the authors trace Macheca’s rise to successful merchant while concurrently describing the political and social changes in New Orleans in the last half of the 19th century. But the authors struggle to prioritize the importance of certain details–descriptions of parades and tangential biographical sketches of bit players can be interesting, but are too often included at the expense of integrative data about the main character. The lack of real narrative about Macheca’s life–other than references to his business records and a great deal of speculation by “family historians”–fails to convince that the grocer played anything more than a minor role in this history–or in the development of the American Mafia. The authors fare better in their depictions of a lively milieu and their convincing analysis of the inextricability of organized crime and local politics.
Occasionally interesting, but not for the reasons the title indicates.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-595-41416-1
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Jan. 2, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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