An intermittently entertaining but rudderless exploration of the early history of the mafia.
A former mobster excavates mafia lore.
Ferrante, the author of Mob Rules and former mafia associate and heist expert, promises that this first volume of a planned trilogy will be free of misinformation repeated over the years by multiple mafia historians. He begins at the beginning, with the germination of the mafia in medieval Sicily under French occupation. From there, he winds into the American mafia’s peak from the 1930s to the 1960s. Ferrante’s primary focus is the rise and fall of Charles “Lucky” Luciano and his associates and adversaries, including his partner, Jewish organized-crime legend Meyer Lansky; their West Coast counterpart Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel; and Luciano’s successors, Frank Costello and Vito Genovese. Drawing on his experience as an ex-mobster, Ferrante argues that mafia standards of loyalty, secrecy, and revenge call for rewriting some of the mob’s most famous myths with a better grasp of the details and motivations involved. He peppers his stories with enlightening morsels about the conditions that facilitated the rise and impunity of organized criminals, touching on topics like ingrained corruption in New Orleans, mobsters’ pride in being Americans, and the surprising discernment the mafia showed in choosing which illicit activities to pursue. However, the tangled and tumultuous nature of mob-based relationships and activities is echoed by a text filled with long threads of names and events that weave in and out of order, with stiff segues between episodes. Exhausting play-by-plays of a wide array of crimes fill pages, while others are simply alluded to. This approach frustrates rather than clarifies readers’ understanding of the mafia’s complicated strands of business, political, and personal relationships, which snaked around Prohibition and World War II, into and out of Atlantic City, Las Vegas, Hollywood, and Cuba.
An intermittently entertaining but rudderless exploration of the early history of the mafia.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781639366019
Page Count: 387
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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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