John Kobler (1910–2000)

I honestly expected more from this book. There is surely a lot of material, a great many little info covering some three hundred years of history. Still, it fails to give a complete portrait of the era... of any era, actually.

I've read quite a few books on Prohibition, and this is the one that starts further back in history. You can say that it starts right back when the United State were born. It relates American behaviours in fact of liquor in those early days, how people acted, what people believed, what they suffered because of alcohol. It traces the first laws prohibiting the sale of alcohol to Indians back in the XVIII century. No other book I read started that far.
But even in these early chapters appears what it will be the main attitude of this book: not a social history. Not the history of people living an era, shaping it and being shaped by it. But a series of anecdotes, some of which very gossipy, that never creates a picture of the whole.

More than half of the book concerns itself with everything that came before Prohibition. First of all, the numerous temperance societies that flourished in the XIX century, although they're never placed inside the society which produced them, so that they feel kind of isolated, as if they lived on a separate level than ordinary people. The author often just focuses on personalities, the weirdest, the better. He relates strange courses of life, weird carriers or attitude, questionable information about well known characters. Never does he place these people in context.
As a reader, I had a very hard time figuring out how these people stood inside their time and place, how much they were expression of a general feeling, how much they were just weird characters. Even trying to connect the lives of people living in the same period, I was never able to built a comprehensive image of the time.

The part regarding Prohibition proper was even worse. Here, we still have a few portrays of prominent people, but the exposition becomes even more sketchy. The author drops the chronological movement of the story - which had given some order to the first part - and arranges chapters in a thematic way, which - for me at least - was even more confusing, because you lose every possible reference.
Personalities are portrayed with even less attention, never are they put in context. Historical facts are barely related. There is no sense of how it was to live in that period, nor how life and attitudes changed over the thirteen years of Prohibition. If I hadn't read other books on the subject, I'd have no idea why at a certain point the idea of repeal became popular. The reasons that made repeal possible are very swiftly - and in my opinion, very inadequately - covered.

Maybe it was my fault to expect more of a social history form this book. There are, it's true, a lot of fun information about the subject, but personally, I don't think this is what makes history friendly to read.… (mehr)

"The Life and Time of Al Capone", this is really a book with two souls.

I liked the first part of the book a lot. This is the part devoted to the time of Al Capone, starting in his childhood, detailing the life of immigrants like his father, the very small word they were allowed to live in, the reasons why young men saw the gangs as the only way to get a living and to do something with their life... if they lived long enough, that it.
The way gangs were organized is detailed quite in depth, the Italians gangs, but also the others. The way gangs fought each other, the reason why they did it. It's like a little world on its own, with its own rules and its own heroes, and its own enemies. This part, detailing the history of the Five Pointers, where Capone started his life as an outlaw, was the more interesting for me.

I also like the part that followed. Capone arrives in Chicago as a young man and here he finds a world which is both the same, but also different from the underworld he knew in New York. A big chunk of the book is spent detailing how Chicago was divided into zones, how different ethnic gangs controlled different parts of the city, the alliances and the enmities. The bosses and their temperaments. The gangs were nearly always linked to ethnic communities and it was interesting to see what links and what bonds stood between these men and the communities they came from. It was a very complex relationship and it was very interesting reading about it.

Then the second part of the book tells Capone's life in particular... and my interest dropped.

Honestly, reading only this book, one will wonder what made Capone one of the better known men in America. He's presented here as a very violent man, with few interests other than make money through bootlegging, brothels and other illegal activities. It is said that he was a skilful manager, but nothing is provided to enforce this idea. There's a long section detailing the way he killed off all his rivals, which is quite repetitive, with no insight into what he was after, his tactic, even his reasons.
A very long part is devoted to the trial that put him in jail and the following (quite uneventful) years in Alcatraz, I suspect because this is probably one of the better documented part of his life, if maybe the least interesting. It was - honestly - quite boring.

This is the only book I read about Capone and I still know very little about him, so I wonder whether there might be more interesting books about him out there. But I did enjoy the first part about the Twenties underworld quite a lot.… (mehr)

2657 Adventures of the Mind from The Saturday Evening Post, edited by Richard Thruelsen and John Kobler (read 5 Oct 1994) The blurb says of this book that it is "exploring the frontiers of contemporary thought with 21 creative thinkers in the sciences, humanities, and arts." I got little out of it. The "thinkers" are famous and said things which are of interest. But many required me to think more than I was moved to. James R. Newman's "Einstein's Great Idea" was illuminating, but should be studied, not merely read.
.… (mehr)