A grand evocation of the Gotham of gangsters, crooked cops, “beefsteak dungeons,” and nativists versus newcomers.
A riveting account of the corrupt landscape of early-20th-century New York City.
Well before the Five Families put their mark on organized crime, Jewish immigrants controlled the trade, exemplified by gambler and crime lord Arnold Rothstein. He started off small, building an empire piece by piece on the East Side, mostly settled by recently arrived Eastern European Jews. So did Tammany politician “Big Tim” Sullivan, who traded his upwardly mobile Irish constituency for the Jewish newcomers. At the time, the city was rife with prostitution, gambling, labor agitation, and rising leftist politics. “Ever since the Eastern European Jews began arriving,” writes Slater, author of Wolf Boys, “the German Jews worried that these unwashed co-religionists, with their orthodox religiosity and radical politics, would undermine their own hard-won social respectability with the ruling patrician class.” Given that Tammany and the New York police force were thoroughly corrupt, the Germans, financier Jacob Schiff among them, pushed the relatively clean mayor to found a Jewish-led vice squad: the Incorruptibles of the title. As Rothstein, later to be infamous for the 1919 Black Sox baseball scandal, drifted deeper into the drug trade and other illicit activities—not least the murder of a rival—the mayor and vice squad leader “debated constitutional issues surrounding policing, such as warrantless raids, undercover stings, and bridging wires.” Slater’s narrative, full of twists and turns, is populated by characters from Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano to Louis Brandeis and Damon Runyon. The author yields not just a gripping crime story—though it certainly is that—but also a richly detailed, informal social history of New York between the Gilded Age and the Jazz Age that, apart from its scholarly rigor, is also highly readable.
A grand evocation of the Gotham of gangsters, crooked cops, “beefsteak dungeons,” and nativists versus newcomers.Pub Date: July 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780316427715
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A deeply learned dive into the frightening visions of technocrats past and present.
The noted historian and New Yorker staffer looks into a future ruled by machines.
Thirty-odd years ago, writes Lepore, liberal democracies of old were being transformed into both authoritarian or autocratic regimes and by “automatocracy, rule by automation, government by machine-driven computation, prediction, and persuasion.” In this pointed rejoinder to Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), which foresaw a world in which humans were essentially superfluous, Lepore charts a long history that extends deep into the “machine age,” beginning in the 17th century, which saw “the artificial as existing not only outside the natural but above it, an improvement upon it.” In this conception, humans were fallible, while machines faithfully and unfailingly obeyed the rules set for them. A logical progression followed in the 1920s with the rise of the Technocracy movement, a variety of fascism widely accepted in the U.S. that held that far from being free and equal, humans should be governed by scientists and engineers who alone “have the intelligence and education to understand the industrial operations that lie at the heart of twentieth-century life.” It’s a short hop from there to the present, with tech billionaires pushing AI and, in the case of the influential “self-described ‘neo-monarchist’” Curtis Yarvin, a dictatorship aided by it. In all this, Lepore writes, it is not just the human animal that suffers but all animals and all habitats, which can only worsen with the incessant demands for energy, rare earths, and water that AI requires. And what “humans crave, in that artificial world, is nature,” a nature that is increasingly silenced. This undemocratic world, benefiting only the wealthy at the expense of all else, is a prison of screens and keyboards from which, she writes memorably, “What is required is to imagine an escape, and then to conduct it.”
A deeply learned dive into the frightening visions of technocrats past and present.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2026
ISBN: 9781324098423
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2026
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
