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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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