An impressive, accessible history of a troubled time.
Scrupulously researched account of the men who made the 1920s roar, and the straight-arrows who stopped them.
Former Chicago magazine executive editor Eig (Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson’s First Season, 2007, etc.) rescues the narrative of Al Capone from the realm of pop melodrama, offering vibrant historical storytelling and a nuanced, enigmatic portrait of Capone and his Chicago milieu. The author discovered several long-forgotten archives of key documents, including unreleased IRS files and “Untouchable” Eliot Ness’ wiretap transcripts. Eig constructs a plausible, often surprising narrative of criminality, but he also fleshes it out into a colorful urban social history. The Capone that emerges here is certainly a ruthless criminal, but far from the psychopath portrayed in films. He appears to be more a natural product of his time, a bemused immigrants’ son who, in the brutal environment of working-class Chicago, intuited that Prohibition offered an opportunity to leap from tavern hustler to major profiteer. Capone was loyal to associates and devoted to his family, apparently tried to broker truces with other gangs before the inevitable internecine bloodbaths and loved nightlife, gambling and women so much that his nickname was “Snorky,” meaning ritzy. The backdrop for Capone’s evolution was a Chicago so chaotic and corrupt that its citizens actually returned the outrageously crooked mayor William Thompson to office, following a seemingly futile reform administration. Capone loved talking to the press, which thrilled people but infuriated the Feds. While “Secret Plot” seems an overstatement, Eig argues that Herbert Hoover was determined to make an example of the gangster, a preoccupation that persisted even as the Depression grew deeper. The flawed Ness’ contributions were minimal, but a little-remembered state’s attorney and IRS agent doggedly built an intricate case against Capone over several years. Their work seems compromised due to the interference of a vengeful judge, who threw out a plea agreement in order to send the gangster to trial and, ultimately, Alcatraz.
An impressive, accessible history of a troubled time.Pub Date: May 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4165-8059-1
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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