Smalltime: A Story of My Family and the Mob

Smalltime: A Story of My Family and the Mob PDF Author: Russell Shorto
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393245594
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2021 Family secrets emerge as a best-selling author dives into the history of the mob in small-town America. Best-selling author Russell Shorto, praised for his incisive works of narrative history, never thought to write about his own past. He grew up knowing his grandfather and namesake was a small-town mob boss but maintained an unspoken family vow of silence. Then an elderly relative prodded: You’re a writer—what are you gonna do about the story? Smalltime is a mob story straight out of central casting—but with a difference, for the small-town mob, which stretched from Schenectady to Fresno, is a mostly unknown world. The location is the brawny postwar factory town of Johnstown, Pennsylvania. The setting is City Cigar, a storefront next to City Hall, behind which Russ and his brother-in-law, “Little Joe,” operate a gambling empire and effectively run the town. Smalltime is a riveting American immigrant story that travels back to Risorgimento Sicily, to the ancient, dusty, hill-town home of Antonino Sciotto, the author’s great-grandfather, who leaves his wife and children in grinding poverty for a new life—and wife—in a Pennsylvania mining town. It’s a tale of Italian Americans living in squalor and prejudice, and of the rise of Russ, who, like thousands of other young men, created a copy of the American establishment that excluded him. Smalltime draws an intimate portrait of a mobster and his wife, sudden riches, and the toll a lawless life takes on one family. But Smalltime is something more. The author enlists his ailing father—Tony, the mobster’s son—as his partner in the search for their troubled patriarch. As secrets are revealed and Tony’s health deteriorates, the book become an urgent and intimate exploration of three generations of the American immigrant experience. Moving, wryly funny, and richly detailed, Smalltime is an irresistible memoir by a masterful writer of historical narrative.

Smalltime: A Story of My Family and the Mob

Smalltime: A Story of My Family and the Mob PDF Author: Russell Shorto
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393245594
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Get Book Here

Book Description
A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2021 Family secrets emerge as a best-selling author dives into the history of the mob in small-town America. Best-selling author Russell Shorto, praised for his incisive works of narrative history, never thought to write about his own past. He grew up knowing his grandfather and namesake was a small-town mob boss but maintained an unspoken family vow of silence. Then an elderly relative prodded: You’re a writer—what are you gonna do about the story? Smalltime is a mob story straight out of central casting—but with a difference, for the small-town mob, which stretched from Schenectady to Fresno, is a mostly unknown world. The location is the brawny postwar factory town of Johnstown, Pennsylvania. The setting is City Cigar, a storefront next to City Hall, behind which Russ and his brother-in-law, “Little Joe,” operate a gambling empire and effectively run the town. Smalltime is a riveting American immigrant story that travels back to Risorgimento Sicily, to the ancient, dusty, hill-town home of Antonino Sciotto, the author’s great-grandfather, who leaves his wife and children in grinding poverty for a new life—and wife—in a Pennsylvania mining town. It’s a tale of Italian Americans living in squalor and prejudice, and of the rise of Russ, who, like thousands of other young men, created a copy of the American establishment that excluded him. Smalltime draws an intimate portrait of a mobster and his wife, sudden riches, and the toll a lawless life takes on one family. But Smalltime is something more. The author enlists his ailing father—Tony, the mobster’s son—as his partner in the search for their troubled patriarch. As secrets are revealed and Tony’s health deteriorates, the book become an urgent and intimate exploration of three generations of the American immigrant experience. Moving, wryly funny, and richly detailed, Smalltime is an irresistible memoir by a masterful writer of historical narrative.

Smalltime

Smalltime PDF Author: Russell Shorto
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 1324020172
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
One of Newsweek's Most Highly Anticipated New Books of 2021 Family secrets emerge as a best-selling author dives into the history of the mob in small-town America. Best-selling author Russell Shorto, praised for his incisive works of narrative history, never thought to write about his own past. He grew up knowing his grandfather and namesake was a small-town mob boss but maintained an unspoken family vow of silence. Then an elderly relative prodded: You’re a writer—what are you gonna do about the story? Smalltime is a mob story straight out of central casting—but with a difference, for the small-town mob, which stretched from Schenectady to Fresno, is a mostly unknown world. The location is the brawny postwar factory town of Johnstown, Pennsylvania. The setting is City Cigar, a storefront next to City Hall, behind which Russ and his brother-in-law, “Little Joe,” operate a gambling empire and effectively run the town. Smalltime is a riveting American immigrant story that travels back to Risorgimento Sicily, to the ancient, dusty, hill-town home of Antonino Sciotto, the author’s great-grandfather, who leaves his wife and children in grinding poverty for a new life—and wife—in a Pennsylvania mining town. It’s a tale of Italian Americans living in squalor and prejudice, and of the rise of Russ, who, like thousands of other young men, created a copy of the American establishment that excluded him. Smalltime draws an intimate portrait of a mobster and his wife, sudden riches, and the toll a lawless life takes on one family. But Smalltime is something more. The author enlists his ailing father—Tony, the mobster’s son—as his partner in the search for their troubled patriarch. As secrets are revealed and Tony’s health deteriorates, the book become an urgent and intimate exploration of three generations of the American immigrant experience. Moving, wryly funny, and richly detailed, Smalltime is an irresistible memoir by a masterful writer of historical narrative.

The Island at the Center of the World

The Island at the Center of the World PDF Author: Russell Shorto
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1400096332
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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Book Description
In a riveting, groundbreaking narrative, Russell Shorto tells the story of New Netherland, the Dutch colony which pre-dated the Pilgrims and established ideals of tolerance and individual rights that shaped American history. "Astonishing . . . A book that will permanently alter the way we regard our collective past." --The New York Times When the British wrested New Amsterdam from the Dutch in 1664, the truth about its thriving, polyglot society began to disappear into myths about an island purchased for 24 dollars and a cartoonish peg-legged governor. But the story of the Dutch colony of New Netherland was merely lost, not destroyed: 12,000 pages of its records–recently declared a national treasure–are now being translated. Russell Shorto draws on this remarkable archive in The Island at the Center of the World, which has been hailed by The New York Times as “a book that will permanently alter the way we regard our collective past.” The Dutch colony pre-dated the “original” thirteen colonies, yet it seems strikingly familiar. Its capital was cosmopolitan and multi-ethnic, and its citizens valued free trade, individual rights, and religious freedom. Their champion was a progressive, young lawyer named Adriaen van der Donck, who emerges in these pages as a forgotten American patriot and whose political vision brought him into conflict with Peter Stuyvesant, the autocratic director of the Dutch colony. The struggle between these two strong-willed men laid the foundation for New York City and helped shape American culture. The Island at the Center of the World uncovers a lost world and offers a surprising new perspective on our own.

Summary of Russell Shorto's Smalltime

Summary of Russell Shorto's Smalltime PDF Author: Everest Media,
Publisher: Everest Media LLC
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 42

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Book Description
Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 I was home for the holidays one night when someone brought up the subject of Frankie Filia, my mother’s cousin who had come home to visit. He was a jazz singer who had left town a lifetime ago for Las Vegas, but he had recently decided to retire and come home. #2 I knew my grandfather was a mobster, but I didn’t know the details. I didn’t want to learn more, and I never did. I was afraid of what those details might reveal about my family. #3 I can't do this. I know that at the center of this story is my grandfather, a dimly lit figure who had a different life outside of my grandmother's house. I know that the research would lead me to the source of her pain. #4 I was named after my grandfather, who died of a heart attack at the age of 57. I didn’t think about him for a year or so after that night at the club, until I saw his name on the back of a membership card.

Descartes' Bones

Descartes' Bones PDF Author: Russell Shorto
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307275663
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
Sixteen years after René Descartes' death in Stockholm in 1650, a pious French ambassador exhumed the remains of the controversial philosopher to transport them back to Paris. Thus began a 350-year saga that saw Descartes' bones traverse a continent, passing between kings, philosophers, poets, and painters. But as Russell Shorto shows in this deeply engaging book, Descartes' bones also played a role in some of the most momentous episodes in history, which are also part of the philosopher's metaphorical remains: the birth of science, the rise of democracy, and the earliest debates between reason and faith. Descartes' Bones is a flesh-and-blood story about the battle between religion and rationalism that rages to this day. A New York Times Notable Book

Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age

Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age PDF Author: Annalee Newitz
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 039365267X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR and Science Friday A quest to explore some of the most spectacular ancient cities in human history—and figure out why people abandoned them. In Four Lost Cities, acclaimed science journalist Annalee Newitz takes readers on an entertaining and mind-bending adventure into the deep history of urban life. Investigating across the centuries and around the world, Newitz explores the rise and fall of four ancient cities, each the center of a sophisticated civilization: the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in Central Turkey, the Roman vacation town of Pompeii on Italy’s southern coast, the medieval megacity of Angkor in Cambodia, and the indigenous metropolis Cahokia, which stood beside the Mississippi River where East St. Louis is today. Newitz travels to all four sites and investigates the cutting-edge research in archaeology, revealing the mix of environmental changes and political turmoil that doomed these ancient settlements. Tracing the early development of urban planning, Newitz also introduces us to the often anonymous workers—slaves, women, immigrants, and manual laborers—who built these cities and created monuments that lasted millennia. Four Lost Cities is a journey into the forgotten past, but, foreseeing a future in which the majority of people on Earth will be living in cities, it may also reveal something of our own fate.

Hollow City

Hollow City PDF Author: Rebecca Solnit
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1788731360
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
Reporting from the front lines of gentrification in San Francisco, Rebecca Solnit and Susan Schwartzenberg sound a warning bell to all urban residents. Wealth is just as capable of ravaging cities as poverty.

Albion's Seed

Albion's Seed PDF Author: David Hackett Fischer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019974369X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 981

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Book Description
This fascinating book is the first volume in a projected cultural history of the United States, from the earliest English settlements to our own time. It is a history of American folkways as they have changed through time, and it argues a thesis about the importance for the United States of having been British in its cultural origins. While most people in the United States today have no British ancestors, they have assimilated regional cultures which were created by British colonists, even while preserving ethnic identities at the same time. In this sense, nearly all Americans are "Albion's Seed," no matter what their ethnicity may be. The concluding section of this remarkable book explores the ways that regional cultures have continued to dominate national politics from 1789 to 1988, and still help to shape attitudes toward education, government, gender, and violence, on which differences between American regions are greater than between European nations.

Household Gods

Household Gods PDF Author: Judith Tarr
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780812564662
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 676

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Book Description
When a troubled housewife awakens one morning as a tavernkeeper in the Roman frontier town of Carnuntum around 170 A.D., she must face plague and war in order to survive and prosper in her new life.

Love Across the Salt Desert

Love Across the Salt Desert PDF Author: Keki N. Daruwalla
Publisher: Penguin Books India
ISBN: 0143417320
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
The iconic title story of this collection narrates how Najab defies his father, the international border between India and Pakistan and the hostile salt desert of the Rann of Kutch for Fatimah. In ‘When Gandhi Came to Gorakhpur’ Shadilal, a small-time lawyer, dithers over giving up his profession and joining the freedom struggle until his mind is made up for him. And when Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni stints on a few silver coins for the poet Abul Qasim, he is visited by terrible nightmares in ‘Of Abul Qasim’. Love across the Salt Desert, which brings together a selection of Keki Daruwalla’s best-received short fiction, presents thematic variety and stunning breadth of vision. His prose is witty, precise and shot through with a unique poetic sensibility. These stories establish Daruwalla, one of India’s best-known poets, as a daring and gifted practitioner of short fiction. Son, have you brought anything? he asked, an edge of iron deliberately introduced into his voice. Yes, replied Najab, as he ushered Fatimah in. The rain stormed down and swept away three years of drought.