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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
SEEN & HEARD
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