Smalltime: A Story of My Family and the Mob - Couverture souple

Shorto, Russell

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1324020172 ISBN 13 : 9781324020172

Editeur : WW Norton & Co, 2022

Synopsis

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.An urgent and intimate exploration of three generations of the American immigrant experience. Smalltime is a moving, wryly funny and richly detailed memoir by a masterful writer of historical narrative.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Russell Shorto is the best-selling author of The Island at the Center of the World, Amsterdam, and Revolution Song, and a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine. He lives in Cumberland, Maryland.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: WW Norton & Co
• Date d'édition: 2022
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1324020172
• ISBN 13: 9781324020172
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 288
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible