Honor Thy Father [VINTAGE 1971]

Talese, Gay

Verlag: World Publishing / Times Mirror, New York, 1971

Beschreibung

Fine condition textured polished black boards with red spine lettering contained in a fine condition color illustrated dust jacket. Includes Author Dedication; Author's Glossary; Author's Note and Index. Illustrated with two sections of black-and-white photographic plates and illustrated family tree front and rear endpapers. Book Club Edition. "The underworld lives by performing the services which convention may condemn and the law prohibit, but which, nevertheless, human appetites crave." - Walter Lippman from the inner front jacket flap. "The Mafia - the most discussed, least understood subject in America - is a syndicate of approximately 5,000 men belonging to twenty-four separate "families" located in major cities in every region of the United States. Since the Prohibition era, it has specialized in providing those illegal commodities which, in Lippmann's words, human appetites crave. It is a risky business tat best. Sidewalks have been littered with bodies because of "misunderstandings" between mafiosi. Yet, since the survivors in Mafia society are most often as quite as the corpses, there has never been a factual account of the Mafia world from the inside: what their homes look like, what they say to their wives, what they tell their children about themselves, what their children come to know without being told. But the "inside" book that has so far eluded other writers has now been written - by Gay Talese. In this monumental work-packed with fascinating, intimate details and brilliant reporting and written in the style of a novel - Talese portrays the secret society as they - and he - have lived it in the six years he traveled with the individuals who have so dominated the crime charts of crime-busting senators. The book begins on a rainy Tuesday night in October 1964 when, on Park Avenue in New York, the famous Mafia chieftain Joseph Bonanno - whose rather in Sicily was a "man of respect" and whose college-educated son was his top lieutenant - was kidnapped by two mobsters and reported by the police as dead on the following morning. Eighteen months (and several corpses) later Joseph Bonanno reappeared as strangely as he had disappeared, setting off a Mafia feud that came to be known as the Banana War. Talese covers the Banana War in intimate detail. The reader gets extraordinary glimpses of men on the run, of "hits" and "misses," and, later, the wives and children and other members of a society that readers of The Godfather know in fictional terms. But Talese's book is fact. And in this case fact is more fantastic than fiction." - excerpt from the front and rear jacket flaps. Bestandsnummer des Verkäufers 002142

Bibliografische Details

Titel: Honor Thy Father [VINTAGE 1971]

Verlag: World Publishing / Times Mirror, New York

Erscheinungsdatum: 1971

Einband: Hardcover

Zustand: Fine

Zustand des Schutzumschlags: Fine

Auflage: Book Club Edition