A riveting if not uplifting look at the gaming industry's inside games during the mob's heyday in Las Vegas. With the cooperation of Frank (a.k.a. Lefty) Rosenthal, one of Chicago's top men in the Nevada pleasure domes, Pileggi (Wiseguy, 1986, etc.) offers a blow-by-blow account of how organized crime looted the casinos they controlled as silent but deadly partners during the 1970s. A wizard of odds whose handicapping talents made him a legend in the Windy City's underworld, the devoutly nonviolent Rosenthal went West in 1968 (at age 38) in search of a fresh start. He subsequently married a gorgeous but unstable showgirl and at her behest took a day job at the Stardust. Although his rap sheet and gangland ties made him impossible to license, Rosenthal effectively ran the show on behalf of absentee owners who regularly collected millions in skimmed cash. In the meantime, the FBI had been keeping a close eye on dozens of top racketeers, including the late Tony Spilotro, a street thug with influential friends. The diminutive Spilotro (known as the Ant, short for pissant) caused considerable mischief for his distant masters, first by conducting an open affair with Rosenthal's alcoholic wife and then confirming for the FBI long-suspected connections when summoned back East to explain his betrayal. Withal, the biggest break came when the Feds obtained the notes of a lower-echelon hoodlum who kept meticulous records of all meetings he attended to ensure reimbursement of his expenses. The heads of a half dozen major crime families were convicted on conspiracy charges, along with scores of smaller fry. Spilotro wound up five feet under in an Indiana cornfield, and an anything-goes era passed into Nevada history. Rosenthal (whose role in the endgame remains unclear) retired to Florida, where he lives on a horse farm. A cautionary tale of what passes for honor among thieves. (First printing of 200,000; first serial to Esquire; film rights to Universal; author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-684-80832-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1995
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
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
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