Without well-known criminal names or impressive crimes to pull an audience in, this will likely appeal only to Mafia buffs.
Ryan (Jackpot: High Times, High Seas, and the Sting that Launched the War on Drugs, 2011) delivers his second true-crime tale, this time covering “Hawaii’s underworld.”
When Charles Marsland's son was murdered, he vowed to find the killers. As a lawyer, Marsland had more recourse than most parents in his position, and he used it to his advantage. Marsland blamed his son's death on the Mafia that he and others were convinced was running Honolulu into the ground. His son, nicknamed Chuckers, had connections with the mob through his work as a bouncer. Marsland asked for and received a transfer from the city's civil law department to the criminal department, and though he was fired from that position, he was later elected by the people to serve as the top city prosecutor. It’s an intriguing tale, to be sure, but the hard facts seem to be in short supply, leaving Ryan with conjecture and engaging anecdotes but without a clear way to weave Marsland's search for his son's killers into his exploration of the underworld he wanted to expose. Like many authors of Mafia-related books, Ryan uses even tangentially related players to move the narrative forward. While portions of the book are gripping and Marsland's search for justice takes him through a twisted landscape, the accompanying heartbreak and frustration that would have connected him with readers are lost in a sea of facts and disputes within Hawaii's legal world. Even the promised juxtaposition of gritty crime with tropical paradise falls flat; the Mafia is clearly a presence in Hawaii, but its reach into everyday life is left largely unexplored, beyond general fear and rising crime rates. Marsland was never able to convict the men he believed responsible for his son's death, so readers are left without closure.
Without well-known criminal names or impressive crimes to pull an audience in, this will likely appeal only to Mafia buffs.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0762793037
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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