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
BOOK REVIEW
Chronology, photographs and personal knowledge combine to make a memorable commemorative presentation.
Jackie Kennedy's secret service agent Hill and co-author McCubbin team up for a follow-up to Mrs. Kennedy and Me (2012) in this well-illustrated narrative of those five days 50 years ago when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
Since Hill was part of the secret service detail assigned to protect the president and his wife, his firsthand account of those days is unique. The chronological approach, beginning before the presidential party even left the nation's capital on Nov. 21, shows Kennedy promoting his “New Frontier” policy and how he was received by Texans in San Antonio, Houston and Fort Worth before his arrival in Dallas. A crowd of more than 8,000 greeted him in Houston, and thousands more waited until 11 p.m. to greet the president at his stop in Fort Worth. Photographs highlight the enthusiasm of those who came to the airports and the routes the motorcades followed on that first day. At the Houston Coliseum, Kennedy addressed the leaders who were building NASA for the planned moon landing he had initiated. Hostile ads and flyers circulated in Dallas, but the president and his wife stopped their motorcade to respond to schoolchildren who held up a banner asking the president to stop and shake their hands. Hill recounts how, after Lee Harvey Oswald fired his fatal shots, he jumped onto the back of the presidential limousine. He was present at Parkland Hospital, where the president was declared dead, and on the plane when Lyndon Johnson was sworn in. Hill also reports the funeral procession and the ceremony in Arlington National Cemetery. “[Kennedy] would have not wanted his legacy, fifty years later, to be a debate about the details of his death,” writes the author. “Rather, he would want people to focus on the values and ideals in which he so passionately believed.”
Chronology, photographs and personal knowledge combine to make a memorable commemorative presentation.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3149-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
When Kaysen was 18, in 1967, she was admitted to McLean Psychiatric Hospital outside Boston, where she would spend the next 18 months. Now, 25 years and two novels (Far Afield, 1990; Asa, As I Knew Him, 1987) later, she has come to terms with the experience- -as detailed in this searing account. First there was the suicide attempt, a halfhearted one because Kaysen made a phone call before popping the 50 aspirin, leaving enough time to pump out her stomach. The next year it was McLean, which she entered after one session with a bullying doctor, a total stranger. Still, she signed herself in: ``Reality was getting too dense...all my integrity seemed to lie in saying No.'' In the series of snapshots that follows, Kaysen writes as lucidly about the dark jumble inside her head as she does about the hospital routines, the staff, the patients. Her stay didn't coincide with those of various celebrities (Ray Charles, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell), but we are not likely to forget Susan, ``thin and yellow,'' who wrapped everything in sight in toilet paper, or Daisy, whose passions were laxatives and chicken. The staff is equally memorable: ``Our keepers. As for finders—well, we had to be our own finders.'' There was no way the therapists—those dispensers of dope (Thorazine, Stelazine, Mellaril, Librium, Valium)—might improve the patients' conditions: Recovery was in the lap of the gods (``I got better and Daisy didn't and I can't explain why''). When, all these years later, Kaysen reads her diagnosis (``Borderline Personality''), it means nothing when set alongside her descriptions of the ``parallel universe'' of the insane. It's an easy universe to enter, she assures us. We believe her. Every word counts in this brave, funny, moving reconstruction. For Kaysen, writing well has been the best revenge.
Pub Date: June 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-679-42366-4
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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