Authoritative, thoroughly researched, eye-opening and grand, good fun to read.
Gilfoyle uses the unpublished autobiography of George Appo—pickpocket, jailbird, conman, stage actor—to illuminate Gotham’s dark criminal subculture of a century ago.
The research here is prodigious—just as it was in the author’s Nevins Prize–winning City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1820-1920 (1992). The endnotes total nearly 100 pages, and the generous illustrations, taken principally from publications of the day, are testimony to the innumerable hours the author spent in libraries, archives, microform rooms and public-records offices. George Appo (1856–1930), not long before he died, wrote his own account of his very rough life, and Gilfoyle (History/Loyola Univ.) quotes that text throughout, using Appo’s words to organize his own. Like Oliver Twist in London, Appo roamed the streets of New York City picking pockets and engaging in other illegalities. He made lots of money, spent it quickly, suffered wounds from bullets, knives, fists, broken bottles (he lost an eye in one encounter) and, repeatedly, was caught, tried and jailed, including doing a stint aboard the Mercury, a former packet ship designed to teach wayward boys nautical skills (it taught them everything but). Appo served time, as well, in Sing Sing, in Clinton State Prison, on Blackwell’s (now Roosevelt) Island and in Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, where his father was also an inmate at the time. Appo actually appeared onstage in In the Tenderloin, a melodrama about a con game at which he was proficient. Using Appo’s story, Gilfoyle teaches us about life on the streets and in the rookeries, and about 19th-century prisons and penology, theories of criminal behavior, melodrama on Broadway, police corruption (Appo rolled over on some cops, lived to regret it), opium dens, the judicial system, political hanky-panky and how to succeed at the “green goods” con game (tricking people out of their cash with the promise of more).
Authoritative, thoroughly researched, eye-opening and grand, good fun to read.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2006
ISBN: 0-393-06190-6
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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