by Margalit Fox ‧ RELEASE DATE: tomorrow
An engrossing portrait of an unlikely criminal mastermind.
A biography of "the nucleus and center of the whole organization of crime" in late-19th-century New York City.
Fredericka "Mother" Mandelbaum (1825-1894) and her family worked as “itinerate peddlers” in central Germany before emigrating to the U.S. in 1850, settling into a community of fellow German Jews on the Lower East Side of New York. Mandelbaum found her calling as a "criminal receiver," a fence for stolen goods, systemizing property crime in what developed into a lucrative business. At the time, professional crime was proliferating due to the advent of easily transferable "greenbacks," paper money, in the 1860s. Mandelbaum was seen as an upstanding member of the community, a generous donor to her synagogue, who hosted many a corrupt police officer and Tammany Hall official at her glamorous dinner parties. She was soon seeding the money needed for sophisticated bank heists. Fox, the author of The Confidence Men, describes the Mandelbaum-sponsored 1869 robbery of Ocean National Bank at length. Entrapped and arrested for trading in stolen silk, Mandelbaum jumped bail and escaped to Canada. Because there was no extradition treaty between Canada and the U.S., she evaded prison, though she considered expatriation "a kind of living death." Throughout this extraordinary life story, Fox explores larger issues of how organized crime grew during the Gilded Age of municipal corruption and stark inequality. The author shows how Mandelbaum “was marginalized three times over: immigrant, woman and Jew,” but nevertheless became New York's first female crime boss by having the right skill set as criminal professionalism blossomed. Renowned for both her "motherliness" and business acumen, Mandelbaum headed what became the "de facto Ladies' Auxiliary of Tammany Hall.” A former accomplished writer of in-depth obituaries for the New York Times, Fox succeeds in rescuing a once-notorious public figure from historical obscurity.
An engrossing portrait of an unlikely criminal mastermind.Pub Date: tomorrow
ISBN: 9780593243855
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
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by Margalit Fox
by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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 Yorker staff 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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Robert Greene ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1998
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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