Cannonball Read 14

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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“An Indian Affairs agent said, ‘The question will suggest itself, which of these people are the savages?”

Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann

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In one word: Injustice. (Bonus words: rage-inducing) This is my second read of this harrowing historical tale. When my local book club picked it out to tackle this year, I dove back in for another listen, and I was filled with just as much anger as the first time around. This book first came to me by way of my favorite podcast, Literary Disco. A quick plot summary: the people of the Osage Nation experienced the displacement and reloaction forced upon many indigenous peoples by […]

Catharsis

The Castleton Massacre: Survivors’ Stories of the Killins Femicide by Sharon Anne Cook and Margaret Carson

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In 1963, a former minister, long separated from his wife, went on a rampage and murdered four people, two of whom were pregnant. Now one of the survivors of the massacre and her cousin have put together the story of what happened. I have never heard of this case before, but picked up this book because of the identities of the authors – one is the niece of the murderer, and one the daughter of one of the victims, but they were raised together and […]

The Books of Greenwich Village

Chin: The Life and Crimes of Mob Boss Chin Gigante by Larry McShane

69 Barrow Street/Strange Embrace by Lawrence Block

The Pope of Greenwich Village by Vincent Patrick

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Unintentionally so, I read three consecutive books set in Greenwich Village (well, I guess technically three out of four as one of the books is a two-for-one and the second story isn’t set in the Village). I decided to cobble together one review of the stories since they shared this similarity… Chin *** When I’d first heard of Chin Gigante, I was more fascinated with the idea that the mob had a thriving operation in Greenwich Village, an area I’ve always associated with Bohemians and the […]

You’d Be Lucky to Have Your Body Found

The Vanishing Triangle by Claire McGowan

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In the 1990s, eight women vanished from the same area in Ireland. Their cases are officially unsolved, their bodies mostly undiscovered, their stories untold. The trouble with true crime is that, with so many ongoing cases, it is easy to overlook individual ones, especially when the trail has grown cold. In this book, the author strives to correct this by telling us the tales of these women and many others who were abducted and murdered in Ireland during this time. I found the writing engaging […]

The Godfather, Part IV

Mob Boss: The Life of Little Al D’Arco, the Man Who Brought Down the Mafia by Jerry Capeci and Tom Robbins

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Among those of us who love mafia stories (both fiction and non-fiction), there’s been a constant discussion of what we’d do with a 4th Godfather movie. Would we continue the tale of Anthony Mancini? Find another story about Michael Corleone? Take another angle? I recently rewatched the first two Godfather movies and was struck at how they’re less about the mafia and more about family (which is why I think they took the cheap route in III by giving Sonny a spawn from an extramarital affair). How do family dynamics, immigration, […]

Does Crime Pay?

Boss of Bosses: The Fall of the Godfather: The FBI and Paul Castellano by Andris Kurins and Joseph F. O'Brien

Sacred by Dennis Lehane

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I hadn’t meant to review these books together but I finished Sacred sooner than I anticipated and it just makes sense to cover them both in one review…   Boss of Bosses I just finished rewatching The Godfather in honor of its 50th anniversary and I decided to tackle this one because the agents applied the movie title as a sobriquet for Paul Castellano, the mob boss of the Gambino crime family who is perhaps most famous as being the guy in John Gotti’s way that got killed in […]



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