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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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