Vigorous storytelling at the intersection of sports and crime history.
An intriguing, long-overlooked tale from the annals of early professional football.
Sid Luckman (1916-1998), writes Rosen (Such Good Girls: The Journey of the Holocaust’s Hidden Child Survivors, 2014, etc.), “once led the most feared team in the National Football League—the ‘Monsters of the Midway’—to five national championship appearances and four titles in seven years,” a gridiron hero lionized by a generation but then, it seems, definitively forgotten. In opening, the author wonders why, noting that Luckman, a quarterback who did much to popularize the pro game, had never before been the subject of a biography. Luckman wasn’t much to sing his own praises, granted, but there was also something that he wanted to distance himself from—namely, his father’s involvement in the Jewish/Italian crime syndicate called Murder, Inc., involvement that included the murder of his brother-in-law and a long stretch in prison. “He chose to spare his loved ones the burden he was used to carrying almost alone,” writes Rosen, and so Luckman did, even if the game he played was not without its criminal aspects, mostly the gambling that surrounded it. As the author notes, Luckman’s name did once “show up in one inconvenient place”: the notebook kept by a mobster who specialized in sports gambling. Luckman did his best to play through the personal turmoil, throwing 135 touchdown passes in his first 10 seasons and becoming a master of the T formation but then fading away in the 1950s. There are many moving parts to the story, and Rosen does a good job of keeping the narrative clear and moving smoothly. One of the more complex of those parts highlights the political uses the Manhattan district attorney, Thomas Dewey, made of the prosecution of Murder, Inc.’s chiefs, who fell one by one.
Vigorous storytelling at the intersection of sports and crime history.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2944-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2019
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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