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 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
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