by Tom Smith ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 2007
An engaging account that may well strike a chord with those who now think of New Orleans as a city torn apart, but the...
The Sopranos meets the Big Easy in an engrossing examination of a crime that rocked late-19th-century Louisiana.
In October 1890, New Orleans police chief David Hennessy was shot dead as he walked home. Who got him? “Dagos,” said the chief, as he died. Freelance reporter Smith (Easy Target, 1996) recreates the crime and its aftermath. Nineteen Italian and Italian-American men were indicted for the chief’s murder, and what followed threatened to tear the city apart. At the first of two scheduled trials, the nine defendants got off; there was “talk of jury bribery.” The next day, an outraged mob that included some of “the best men of New Orleans,” lynched 11 of the 19 men accused of Hennessy’s murder. This in turn sparked outrage, and not only in the Italian community of New Orleans. All across the nation, Italian immigrants were incensed, holding mass meetings and calling for justice and retribution. In the midst of the uproar, Italy’s ambassador to America returned home, and there was even talk of war between the two countries. President Benjamin Harrison finally repaired international relations by sending the Italian government $25,000 to be distributed among the families of those who were lynched. Smith’s skill with dialogue lends a real vividness to this account, and his evocation of the city is captivating as he describes the years before jazz, when pianists kept playing the same tired Stephen Foster tunes, and electricity was an uncertain innovation. Unfortunately, beyond noting that the publicity surrounding the trial and lynching introduced the word “mafia” to the American public, he doesn’t explore how the events shaped America’s images of either New Orleans or Italian immigrants.
An engaging account that may well strike a chord with those who now think of New Orleans as a city torn apart, but the author could have gone further in explaining the long-term consequences of the events he so painstakingly recreates.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2007
ISBN: 1-59228-901-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2006
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Tom Clavin ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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