Gritty memoir by a former Boston gangster, written with the help of New York Post crime reporter Harney. Fopiano begins with a bang, describing a recurrent dream of being shot in the head (``I collapse and roll into the wet gutter, bleeding and helpless''). The dream comes true in 1975, ending his underworld career—but not his life (he now lives in Las Vegas, a born-again Catholic, ``keeping out of trouble, and not doing too bad at all''). Time was when all he did was bad. Fopiano started out as a street punk in Boston's Italian North End, selling bootlegged cigarettes and pulling petty burglaries. The thefts escalated to shopping centers, banks, cargo trucks, armored cars; once, hiding out after a heist worth $740,000, he passed the time by playing Monopoly with real money. Fueling these crimes was a violent streak that culminated in ``wild, murderous rages''—but Fopiano's violence was part-and-parcel of the Boston mob scene, where a bloody turf-war littered the city with scores of bodies. Often the killer was free-lance executioner Joe ``the Animal'' Barboza (``he operated with a speed and precision that was almost mechanical''), one of the many mobsters whom Fopiano describes in gruesome detail. Others included Meyer Lansky, for whom the author worked as a courier; accused Boston Strangler Albert da Salvo (innocent, says Fopiano, who fingers another mobster as the real serial killer); Tony Pino, mastermind of the 1950 Brinks Robbery; and Johnny Rosselli, the suave Hollywood mobster who, before being bumped off, passed on to Fopiano the alleged secret of the Kennedy assassination (that the Mob threw the 1960 election to Kennedy by rigging the Illinois vote; when Kennedy responded with an anti- Mafia campaign, the Mob hit back with the help of Fidel Castro). Fast action in a moral vacuum: frightening and compelling. (Photos—not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-312-09748-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1993
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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