(Random House, 357 pages, $27)
In the early morning of April 14, 1903, a nearly decapitated body was found stuffed into a wooden barrel on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Six men were arrested in connection with the crime. One, Giuseppe Morello, a slim man with a broad mustache and a claw-like right hand, ran a counterfeiting ring that authorities already had been circling. But the Sicilian immigrant known as “the Clutch Hand” was cunning as well as ruthless: The murder earned him rivals’ fear but never cost him a prison sentence. By 1911, Morello had established himself as the American Mafia’s first “boss of all bosses.”
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Dash is curiously silent about the alliances that Sicilian mobsters forged with Irish and Jewish gangs, said Clare Longrigg in the London Sunday Telegraph, but he doesn’t neglect law enforcement’s heroes. Tiny Joe Petrosino, one of the NYPD’s few Italian-speaking detectives, gave his life trying to prevent men like Morello from “ruining the reputation of Italians in general.” When Morello himself is eventually murdered during a Prohibition-era gang war, Dash nudges you “as close to the scene as possible” without getting “blood on your shoes,” said Lee Lamothe in the Toronto Globe and Mail. “Worth reading” for style alone, The First Family is “a perfect example of literary historical nonfiction.”
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Also of interest...in picture books for grown-upsfeature How About Never—Is Never Good for You?; The Undertaking of Lily Chen; Meanwhile, in San Francisco; The Portlandia Activity Book
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Author of the week: Karen Russell
feature Karen Russell could use a rest.
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The Double Life of Paul de Man by Evelyn Barish
feature Evelyn Barish “has an amazing tale to tell” about the Belgian-born intellectual who enthralled a generation of students and academic colleagues.
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Book of the week: Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
feature Michael Lewis's description of how high-frequency traders use lightning-fast computers to their advantage is “guaranteed to make blood boil.”
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Also of interest...in creative rebellion
feature A Man Called Destruction; Rebel Music; American Fun; The Scarlet Sisters
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feature For a famous memoirist, Susanna Kaysen is highly ambivalent about sharing details about her life.
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You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age by Robert Wagner
feature Robert Wagner “seems to have known anybody who was anybody in Hollywood.”
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Book of the week: Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire by Peter Stark
feature The tale of Astoria’s rise and fall turns out to be “as exciting as anything in American history.”