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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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