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LUCKY LUCIANO

THE REAL AND THE FAKE GANGSTER

Competent, but no more than that.

Middling true-crime life of Mafia kingpin Lucky Luciano, once a byword for the most vicious breed of mobster.

Born Salvatore Lucania in Sicily in 1897, Charles Luciano had been a made man since emerging from the worst tenements of the Lower East Side, writes BBC scriptwriter Newark (Mafia Allies: The True Story of America’s Secret Alliance with the Mob in World War II, 2007). That he changed his first name is evidence that he was a fastidious sort who “didn’t like the fact that Salvatore could be shortened to Sal or Sally,” perhaps not the best moniker for someone almost certainly bound for prison. Luciano learned the ropes among fellow up-and-coming mobsters such as Al Capone and Meyer Lansky, but for all the murdering and assorted felonies, Luciano emerges here as a couple of things: first, a careful businessman, and, second, a plant. Having reorganized the Mafia into a modern, streamlined enterprise and run his vast crime organization from a prison in upstate New York, Luciano was deported to Italy after World War II. Lansky, writes Newark, had helped military intelligence nab fascist operators in New York, even allowing federal agents to work as collectors to gather intelligence (said Lansky, “I think this must be the only time the U.S. Navy ever directly helped the Mafia”). Luciano had helped the G-men battle communist organizers in the New York labor unions infiltrated by the mob, keeping supplies flowing to ports in Europe. Newark suggests that the U.S. government may have kept Luciano busy fighting communists as a deep-cover agent while in exile in Italy. More to the point, he was held up as the center of a narcotics-smuggling empire that, the author argues, Luciano did not control—which allowed those federal agencies “to justify their own bloated law enforcement budgets.” That federal authorities and organized crime ever colluded isn’t really news to anyone who follows the organized-crime literature though.

Competent, but no more than that.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2010

ISBN: 978-0-312-60182-9

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: June 21, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2010

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...

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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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