A Manhattan cop breaks family tradition—his uncles, cousin, father, and grandfather all were members of the Gambino crime family—and is accused of selling his shield after a highly decorated career. When his cousin Jim-Jim and his uncle Jimmy were rubbed out for a scam that embarrassed the Gambino bosses, Eppolito—a highly decorated NYPD legend who made no effort to hide his contempt for the ``three P's: perps, pussies, and pencil-pushing prigs''—felt his East Flatbush roots stir. Here, writing with the help of Drury (coauthor, Incident at Howard Beach, 1989, etc.), Eppolito dwells long on his thicker-than-blood Italian upbringing in the 50's—street festivals, marbled funeral parlors, the Grand Mark Tavern in Bensonhurst (``sit-down central'' for wiseguys), and, particularly, the beatings by his father, pounding home the Neapolitan ethos of honor and respect. After his father's death, Eppolito joined the NYPD and became a can-do cop who divided humanity into two categories: those who deserved respect, and those beneath contempt. Here, he proudly describes an attack with buddy cops on a ``group of junkies, Rastafarians'' in Prospect Park. Putting pantyhose over his face, Eppolito broke wrists, legs, and arms, and crippled a man for life. For one stick-up suspect, the author invented a new interrogation technique: After punching ``Bugs forty times in the head,'' Eppolito filled a bucket with hot, fuming ammonia and slammed the man's face in it. In 1978, Internal Affairs made a case against the cop for passing police intelligence to Rosario Gambino (nephew of Carlo, capo da tutti capi). Eppolito was acquitted but retired from the force shortly afterward when Martin Scorsese offered him a part in Goodfellas. Flat characterizations with some sharp N.Y.C. detail (``Italian tuxedo—that's the white, sleeveless T-shirt''): mostly for Mafia/NYPD buffs. (Photos—16 pages of b&w—not seen.)
Pub Date: June 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-671-74221-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1992
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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