Cannonball Read 12

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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BadFellas

Murder Machine by Gene Mustain & Jerry Capeci

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Kind of wonder what could have been if Martin Scorsese had gotten his hands on this book before Nicholas Pileggi’s Wiseguy. This is Goodfellas, only if the murder montage was like half the movie. I knew the name Roy DeMeo and that he was the head of perhaps the most murderous crew in Mafia history but I didn’t know exactly what is story was or how it operated. On a bit of a mob kick, I finally picked this one up. It’s a brutal tale and both writers […]

Babylon Brooklyn

A Brotherhood Betrayed: The Man Behind the Rise and Fall of Murder, Inc. by Michael Cannell

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Look, I am very simple. I like mob books, especially but not limited to ones set in New York City. If you write a good mob tale, fiction or non-fiction, I’ll devour it and give you your credit. So that’s what I’m here to do with this one. I’ve been curious about the Abe Reles story ever since reading Kevin Baker’s flat, unoriginal The Big Crowd. His ghost seemed to loom over everything mob and politic related in New York for decades. The head of the mob’s […]

Too Clever For Its Own Good

The Paragon Hotel by Lindsay Faye

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Bingo Square: The Roaring 20’s I loved Lindsay Faye’s The Gods of Gotham and already had a copy of this book – seemed like the perfect fit for the 20’s. From the topic matter and description, it was but I was incredibly disappointed with this novel, especially since it should have been my cup of tea. The narrator is Alice “Nobody” James – as the novel begins, she is on a train, heading to Portland, Oregon with a gunshot wound, fleeing her former life in […]

Wave After Wave, Slowly Drifting…

The Winter of Frankie Machine by Don Winslow

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A few days ago, I read Martin Scorsese’s interview reflecting on The Irishman and his career in general. A small tidbit in the interview was that he and frequent collaborator Robert De Niro had passed on adapting The Winter of Frankie Machine in the aughts. De Niro read it and liked it, almost as much as he did I Heard You Paint Houses, which was adapted into The Irishman.  The Irishman was one of the better movies I saw in 2019. I’m a big Martin Scorsese fan. When I read that […]

La Famiglia

Mafia Dynasty by John Davis

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Since watching The Irishman, I’ve had a yen for Mafia crime stories. I’ve always wanted to know more about the Gambino family since they were the most powerful of the five families during the time the mob ran everything. So I picked this lauded work up. It gave me everything I need in the best way possible: being detailed without being tedious. It covers the families coming over from Italy and Sicily, how what we know to be the “mafia” came into existence and how the […]



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