Underworld

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While Eisenstein documented the forces of totalitarianism and Stalinism upon the faces of the Russian peoples, DeLillo offers a stunning, at times overwhelming, document of the twin forces of the cold war and American culture, compelling that "swerve from evenness" in which he finds events and people both wondrous and horrifying. Underworld opens with a breathlessly graceful prologue set during the final game of the Giants-Dodgers pennant race in 1951. Written in what DeLillo calls "super-omniscience" the sentences sweep from young Cotter Martin as he jumps the gate to the press box, soars over the radio waves, runs out to the diamond, slides in on a fast ball, pops into the stands where J. Edgar Hoover is sitting with a drunken Jackie Gleason and a splenetic Frank Sinatra, and learns of the Soviet Union's second detonation of a nuclear bomb. It's an absolutely thrilling literary moment. When Bobby Thomson hits Branca's pitch into the outstretched hand of Cotter--the "shot heard around the world"--and Jackie Gleason pukes on Sinatra's shoes, the events of the next few decades are set in motion, all threaded together by the baseball as it passes from hand to hand.

"It's all falling indelibly into the past," writes DeLillo, a past that he carefully recalls and reconstructs with acute grace. Jump from Giants Stadium to the Nevada desert in 1992, where Nick Shay, who now owns the baseball, reunites with the artist Kara Sax. They had been brief and unlikely lovers 40 years before, and it is largely through the events, spinoffs, and coincidental encounters of their pasts that DeLillo filters the Cold War experience. He believes that "global events may alter how we live in the smallest ways," and as the book steps back in time to 1951, over the following 800-odd pages, we see just how those events alter lives. This reverse narrative allows the author to strip away the detritus of history and pop culture until we get to the story's pure elements: the bomb, the baseball, and the Bronx. In an epilogue as breathless and stunning as the prologue, DeLillo fast-forwards to a near future in which ruthless capitalism, the Internet, and a new, hushed faith have replaced the Cold War's blend of dread and euphoria.

Through fragments and interlaced stories--including those of highway killers, artists, celebrities, conspiracists, gangsters, nuns, and sundry others--DeLillo creates a fragile web of connected experience, a communal Zeitgeist that encompasses the messy whole of five decades of American life, wonderfully distilled.

Book Description

Our lives, our half century.

Nick Shay and Klara Sax knew each other once, intimately, and they meet again in the American desert. He is trying to outdistance the crucial events of his early life, haunted by the hard logic of loss and by the echo of a gunshot in a basement room. She is an artist who has made a blood struggle for independence.

Don DeLillo's mesmerizing novel opens with a legendary baseball game played in New York in 1951. The glorious outcome -- the home run that wins the game is called the Shot Heard Round the World -- shades into the grim news that the Soviet Union has just tested an atomic bomb.

The baseball itself, fought over and scuffed, generates the narrative that follows. It takes the reader deeply into the lives of Nick and Klara and into modern memory and the soul of American culture -- from Bronx tenements to grand ballrooms to a B-52 bombing raid over Vietnam.

A generation's master spirits come and go. Lennny Bruce cracking desperate jokes, Mick Jagger with his devil strut, J. Edgar Hoover in a sexy leather mask. And flashing in the margins of ordinary life are the curiously connectecd materials of the culture. Condoms, bombs, Chevy Bel Airs and miracle sites on the Web.

Underworld is a story of men and women together and apart, seen in deep clear detail and in stadium-sized panoramas, shadowed throughout by the overarching conflict of the Cold War. It is a novel that accepts every challenge of these extraordinary times -- Don DeLillo's greatest and most powerful work of fiction.

Customer Reviews:

Flashes of excellence.......2007-09-20

"Underworld" begins with a stunning, mesmerizing prologue detailing the famous 1951 pennant game between the Dodgers and the Giants, swerving in and out of characters, both real and fictitious, with a grace and ease that, unfortunately, DeLillo doesn't quite live up to in the rest of the very-long novel.

The theme of waste and the interplay of personal history versus History (as an extension of the military-industrial machine highlighted by the Cold War) is heavy through the book, which moves from the prologue to 1992, and then steadily backward through the Cold War. There are numerous plots and infinite details worked into the non-linear narrative, and at some point I began to wonder how much was actually connected to the overarching themes and how much was just thrown in because it seemed so. Granted, there are many moments in the book where things suddenly make sense, things that DeLillo may not have even intended or planned for, but these few moments of epiphany do not make for compelling reading.

Instead, they only underscore the better parts of the book and leave bereft the slower, more mundane sections. DeLillo doesn't appear to have had a capable editor, or didn't listen to one, because the 830 pages could have been trimmed considerable, and then we would have had a much better novel.

All of that said, this novel is important because it captures the things just beyond articulation, the many-layered and myriad ideas and concepts that we tend to think about very often but are unable to fully grasp. That is the "Underworld" DeLillo suggests. I recommend this novel only for someone ready and willing to closely read a complex and intriguing and at times sleepy narrative.

How to Review a Masterpiece?.......2007-03-14

How to review such a massive masterpiece as Don deLillo's "Underground"? It's a portrait of a city and a culture done
in oils spread and then mushed around on the canvas. Weeder is challenged. I'll start by pointing out the coincidence
of the year the story begins, 1951. In that year, Nick Shay, the protagonist in the princial tale, is 17 and in New York.
It so happens that in 1951 I too was 17 and spent some time in New York. To my mind, DeLillo has recreated the sights
and sounds of that era in that city in a way I find exciting. The U.N. building was under construction. In July, the air
was clear and the skies were blue. Later, there was a nickel World Series between the Giants and the Yankees.
Tourists did not seem to outnumber natives, and under the gruffness of the waiters at Lindy's or Childs, there often
lurked a soft side, a wry humor that must have come originally from the shtetl. Single parent families were rarer then.
Musicals were big on Broadway: "Guys and Dolls," "The King and I." People met in cafes and bars and actually talked.
They weren't required to shout over the crashing musical background or the obnoxious people at the next table. It was
a "rooftop summer, . . .the laughter of a dozen people sounding small and precious in the night, floating over the cold
soup toward skylights and domes and watertanks, or a hurry-up lunch, an old friend, beach chairs and takeout
Chinese and how the snapdragons smell buttery in the sun." There were policemen directing traffic, and women
who operated elevators. There were choices for shoppers: Macy's, Gimbel's, Saks. From the Bowery to the Mayor's
home at Gracet Mansion, whether you were looking at sheets hanging from clotheslines in Harlem or taking the
Circle Cruise around Manhattan, there was a special feel, an excitement barely suppressed. Cars driving in town
had to use only their parking lights, to prevent glare. Cab drivers all seemed to be raconteurs. The famous moveable
orchestra platform at the Roxy, a marvel of engineering, came from backstage and then dipped down
into the pit. But after a symphony concert, you felt "a curious loss, that thing you used to feel as a child
when you walked out of a movie house in the middle of the day and the streets were all agitation and nasty
glare, every surface intense and jarring, people in loud clothing that did not fit.

Downtown, "atop the older banks, on the parapets and setbacks--robed oracles jutting over the
streets or helmeted men of unrevealing aspect, lawgivers or warriors, it was hard to tell...were called the Titans
of Finance."

This novel extends over decades, from the early 1950s to the early 1990s. There are dozens of characters, some
of whom reappear regularly. The central theme is about the home run hit by Bobby Thompson that won the National
League pennant for the Giants. At the game we meet J. Edgar Hoover in all his power and closet gaynness.
The baseball is recovered and then passes through the hands of collectors, money-grubbers, and frauds.
The author tantalizes us by going back and forth in time as the chapters run on, so that, for instance, Nick
in his late fifties visits an elderly artist named Klara Sachs, but we discover near the end of the book that they
had an intensely passionate but brief affair when he was in his teens and she was a struggling young artist
with a chess-teaching husband and a baby.

It's the human story that captures the reader and it's the atomic bomb that dominates the thinking of the characters.
Klara's husband, Albert, discusses it with the Jesuit priest, Father Paulus. We sit next to Chucky Wainwright, one of
the baseball's owners, as he navigates a B-52 dropping bombs on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Nick works in
waste management now; he worries about radioactive garbage. His brother Matt is at a secret location in the desert,
designing guided missile systems, working with bombheads. Klara is supervising a team of volunteers repainting
retired B-52s in Arizona. Sister Alma Edgar instructs her young students in the method to avoid atomic radiation
in case of an attck: Duck and Cover. As one character puts it, "A-bombs raining from the sky, what are you
supposed to do? Take a bus downtown?" There are guys who "wear boxer shorts with geometric designs that contain the
escape routes they've been assigned when the missiles start flying."

This is a rich, rich story of interconnected episodes and people. The author revisits the great Blackout of 1965,
the garbage strike of 1974, and gives the reader some remarkable side commentsI even found passages I could skip, such as the
impromptu sermons of Lenny Bruce, apparently reprinted verbatim. We also learn about the dark side of the city,
kids "raised on the felony alphabet," a black man sneaking into his home in the middle of the night, "a silence with
a set of eyes." Sidewalks are occupied by "fresh air inspectors" standing on the corner, elderly men mostly."

So much to praise and so little to criticize! A genuine 5-star read.

The Great Big Book of Don DeLillo.......2007-03-09

By all accounts his "magnum opus," *Underworld* is indeed a great ((and a great big)) novel--a sweeping panoramic epic of life as Don DeLillo has known it from an Italian-American Bronx neighborhood in the 50s to the end of the 20th century and our post-Cold War global society. Believe it or not, the two main themes of this massive text are the nuclear arms race and the crisis of waste management. And weaving these two seemingly--but not in reality--disparate themes together is a third: Bobby Thompson's famous homerun that clinched a miraculous pennant for the New York Giants on the last day of the season. As it happens, on the same day, the Soviets detonated an atomic bomb thereby announcing what seemed for the next thirty years to be the countdown towards the end of the world.

DeLillo brings these elements together in a dazzlingly orchestrated work that credibly characterizes an entire era in a story rich in character and incident, both real and imagined. There are walk-on cameos by Jackie Gleason, J. Edgar Hoover, Frank Sinatra, and Lenny Bruce, among others, that seem too authentic to be entirely made up. There are cultural references to products, advertisements, and TV shows of the period, particularly the 50s and 60s, that lend the proceedings the echoing realism of nostalgia. There is drama, violence, infidelity, love, greed, faith, faithlessness, philosophy, and humor--in short, *Underworld* is a kind of huge shambling Americanized version of a Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy novel, a work that seeks, as far as its possible, to capture the experience of life whole and still breathing.
*Underworld* is like a symphony--outsized, loud, ambitious, packed with thematic repetition, variation, and improvisation. It's unwieldy in places, verbose, grandiose--there's more of it than strictly necessary, but this is often the case with `masterpieces.' By their very nature, they are often imperfect. It fails, but it fails magnificently.

*Underworld* reads like DeLillo's swan song, even though he'd go on writing for the next decade, and is writing still. You get the feeling, though, that he wanted to get everything down once and for all before it was too late. He is opening up the memory banks in *Underworld,* giving it all away, the rich ore of his personal past. Of the last two hundred pages or so of this 800+ page novel, he could have lost 40% and done no harm to the plot. Incident is multiplied upon incident, many of these from the boyhood of the main character Nick Shay and you suspect many of these episodes were memories more factual than fictional from DeLillo's own boyhood, things he wished to immortalize. But for the most part, you don't mind the excess length and anecdotal bric-a-brac because DeLillo is the kind of writer who can describe someone chewing gum and make it fascinating reading. More tellingly, this elegiac and `confessional' spirit lends a mellowness to *Underworld,* a sweetness that doesn't exist in his work before or since. The acerbic cynicism, the edgy paranoia, the dark outrage, the insidious conspiracy theories are all tempered by a gentleness for those things which are still good about life, or bittersweet, as the case may be. DeLillo is making a summation, it seems, of life as he's known it, and he's trying to be as fair to it all as possible. He's saying, "And it was good."

Masterpiece it might be, his biggest and most inclusive book it no doubt is, but *Underworld* is not my favorite Don DeLillo novel ((*White Noise is*)). Its not even in my top three. Still, I don't have the heart to give such a monumental effort anything less than five stars. DeLillo gave it all up in *Underworld* and for that he earns my unreserved appreciation and admiration.

Awful.......2007-03-01

Did not make it through the first chapter. I could not understand what DeLillo was writing and, finally, I did not care.

I might have to read it again to say anything intelligent about this book........2007-01-24

I made it all the way through, which was an accomplishment. It is beautifully written, but about all I can tell you about it is that it is about a baseball. And a lot of other stuff. I really liked White Noise and Libra, but this book is a lot more obscure.

Villains' Paradise: A History of Britain's Underworld

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HONOR AMONG THIEVES AND THE BRITISH BOBBY!

Villains' Paradise: A History of Britain's Underworld
Donald Thomas
Manufacturer: Pegasus Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1933648171

Book Description

"Thomas has excelled himself. An important and riveting study in social history, it also has a very pertinent relevance in the crime-riddled society that is Britain today."- The Sunday Times (London)

"A magnificent book. Beautifully written, utterly compelling: almost without fault in every respect."- The Literary Review

Venturing into the urban underbelly of postwar Britain, and especially of London, this riveting true-crime chronicle explores the shadowy ganglands where for twenty-five years armed robbery, prostitution, vice, and drugs flourished under racketeer kings.

Customer Reviews:

HONOR AMONG THIEVES AND THE BRITISH BOBBY!.......2007-09-03

Donald Thomas' book is a good read for anyone interested in the history of British crime. From the petty criminals to the organized gangs, it's all here in gritty, vivid detail. In the day's before HI-TECH spy cameras and electronic detectors, your average British thief had a somewhat easy time of it. A chance for a "cuppa" in between the break-ins and wage snatches. Of particular interest in the book, is the section that charts the creation of the "spiv" or black marketeer during WWII and after. You see unlike everyone else,the British people suffered under food and other shortages right into 1954. No wonder crime flourished in the Kingdom, just to be able to get some sugar and chocolate if nothing else.

Infamous gangs like the Kray's and Richardson's are included. Police corruption, oh yes even in good old blighty is fully exposed. Prostitution and pornography, illegal gambling, art thefts and frauds, there's something for everyone here. Not just the criminal perspective but the social and economic one as well. It was a time when the police really knew the criminals. When safe blowers and getaway drivers took pride in their work and usually surrendered quietly when caught. It was clubs and pickaxe handles rather than guns. A code or understanding between the good guys and the bad guys. Unlike today, where the real master criminals are all highly calculated and corporate.

Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization

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Long but very important book
Underworld
Drivel
The Clues That Lie Under The Seas
Intriguing and Well-researched

Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization
Graham Hancock
Manufacturer: Crown
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Early Civilization | Ancient | History | Subjects | Books

ASIN: 1400046122
Release Date: 2002-10-15

Book Description

From Graham Hancock, bestselling author of Fingerprints of the Gods, comes a mesmerizing book that takes us on a captivating underwater voyage to find the ruins of a lost civilization that’s been hidden for thousands of years beneath the world’s oceans.

While Graham Hancock is no stranger to stirring up heated controversy among scientific experts, his books and television documentaries have intrigued millions of people around the world and influenced many to rethink their views about the origins of human civilization. Now he returns with an explosive new work of archaeological detection. In Underworld, Hancock continues his remarkable quest underwater, where, according to almost a thousand ancient myths from every part of the globe, the ruins of a lost civilization, obliterated in a universal flood, are to be found.

Guided by cutting-edge science and the latest archaeological scholarship, Hancock begins his mission to discover the truth about these myths and examines the mystery at the end of the last Ice Age. As the glaciers melted between 17,000 and 7,000 years ago, sea levels rose and more than 15 million square miles of habitable land were submerged underwater, resulting in a radical change to the Earth’s shape and the conditions in which people could live. Using the latest computer techniques to map the world’s changing coastlines, Hancock finds astonishing correspondences with the ancient flood myths.

Filled with thrilling accounts of his own participation in dives off the coast of Japan, as well as in the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and the Arabian Sea, we watch as Hancock discovers underwater ruins exactly where the myths say they should be—sunken kingdoms that archaeologists never thought existed. Fans of Hancock’s previous adventures will find themselves immersed in Underworld, a provocative book that provides both compelling hard evidence for a fascinating, forgotten episode in human history and a completely new explanation for the origins of civilization as we know it.

Customer Reviews:

Long but very important book.......2007-04-18

I believe this is a far more important book than most people realize. While the author suffers from a lack of editing and brevity, he more than makes up for it in his subject selection and hands-on detective work. I read the entire book and it was a detailed, highly convincing argument that mankind has done a really slipshod job of investigating our history in terms of looking at the oceans of the world.

I thought the photographs in the book were fantastic and my only complaint is that there weren't more of them! Especially interesting were the underwater photos of Yonaguni which I find almost impossible to believe could be natural phenomena. I wish Mr. Hancock had also put together a DVD release of this material as I think that the actual pictures tell a story that the written word itself can hardly match. The author does actually mention the difficulty of underwater photography in the various locations he travels and this is part of the importance of the book; that is, that we need advances in our ability to image places we are investigating in order to tell the story to the public and thereby capture both imagination and funding in order to continue exploring the hidden history of mankind.

Those who gave this book bad reviews are ignoring the fact that, to my knowledge, modern history has absolutely no explanation at all for formations like Yonaguni, if it is indeed man-made. The author's book is, as far as I can tell, one of the only attempts to provide any kind of real explanation for this. Yonaguni is an anomaly whose only other explanation (that it is a natural formation) is almost impossible to believe.

With some additional editing, etc., in a second edition, this book could easily rate five stars. And the subject matter is important enough that it needs to.

Underworld.......2007-03-09

As Far as I know no one else has informed us about all of these underwater places where people, at one time, lived. As always Handcock makes you think.

Drivel.......2007-02-15

These books are nonsense. Any books whose titles include any of the words 'mysterious', 'secrets', 'Templar', 'alien', 'code', 'supernatural', 'mythic', 'cosmic', are just giving away the fact that they are unscientific rubbish. They are based on wishes and dreams, but we should all know that children wish, adults decide.

The Clues That Lie Under The Seas.......2007-02-11

This is a very ambitious and rich journey to sites underwater as author Graham Hancock and wife/photographer Santha Faiia continue their quest in uncovering more clues to a "lost" ancient civilization.

Through a text that makes the reader part of the expedition and outstanding illustrations & photographs, the exploration touches on sites throughout the world, including the Bahamas, Malta, Japan and India.

Hancock again makes a compelling argument for his theory that global floods that brought an end to the Ice Age wiped out a civilization, with the survivors sharing their highly-advanced knowledge with newer ancient societies.

And that the path may lead under the seas makes for a fascinating read.

Intriguing and Well-researched.......2006-11-03

In "Underworld," Graham Hancock takes on the mythological story of The Flood. Tackled with the same attention to detail that he displays in his previous alternative archeology books, Hancock visits and describes underwater ruins and connects them with the mythological traditions of many cultures. He blasts the socks off of conventional archeological theory that says that civilization began only 6,000 years ago. The book is richly illustrated with beautiful photographs--both color and black and white--taken by his wife Santha Faiia.

Although I enjoyed the descriptions of many previous cultures and the author's intriguing theories, "Underworld" does not grasp my imagination nor does it inflame my speculation the same way my favorite Graham Hancock book, "Fingerprints of the Gods" does. I also adore Santha Faiia's photographs in "Heaven's Mirror" much more than in this book, probably because so many of the photos in "Underworld" were taken underwater and so tend to be bluish. Nonetheless, as with any Hancock/Faiia book, I am amazed at the amount of thorough research it took to write the book, I like that they actually visit the places they write about, and I appreciate the book as a reference in writing my own books.

Carole Chapman is the author of "When We Were Gods: Insights on Atlantis, Past Lives, Angelic Beings of Light and Spiritual Awakening," "The Golden Ones: From Atlantis to a New World," and "Blessed: A Quest for Atlantis in Egypt Leads to Apparitions of the Virgin Mary."

Blood Brothers: The Criminal Underworld of Asia

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Big Ears Du, Pockmarked Huang & Brokentooth Kwoi
Tremendous
Great Survey of Roots of Asian Crime & Its Political Ties

Blood Brothers: The Criminal Underworld of Asia
Bertil Lintner
Manufacturer: Palgrave Macmillan
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Criminology | Crime & Criminals | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 1403961549

Book Description

From pirates singing Ricky Martin to mob hits carried out with samurai swords, Bertil Lintner offers a fascinating look at organized crime in the Asian Pacific. Both Western and Asian pundits assert that shady deals are an Asian way of life. Some argue that corruption and illicit business ventures-gambling, prostitution, drug trafficking, gun running, and oil smuggling-are entrenched parts of the Asian value system. Yet many Asian leaders maintain that their cities are safer than Sydney, Amsterdam, New York, or Los Angeles. Mak-ing use of expertise gained from twenty years of living in Asia, Lintner exposes the role crime plays in the countries of the Far East. In Blood Brothers, he takes readers inside the criminal fraternities of Asia, examining these networks and their histories to answer one question: How are civil societies all over the world to be protected from the worst excesses of increasingly globalized mobsters?

Customer Reviews:

Big Ears Du, Pockmarked Huang & Brokentooth Kwoi.......2005-07-01

Bertil Lintner belongs to a long, fruitful tradition of Anglo-American journalism on Asia. Here he collects a huge amount of historical and current data on large-scale organized crime in East and Southeast Asia; drugs, prostitution, gambling, labor rackets, extortion, "protection," kidnapping, piracy and smuggling are all covered. He defines this difficult, even dangerous subject broadly, including Russia and activities of Asian gangsters in Australia and the USA, with plentiful background on the region to provide context. Lintner discusses infamous secret societies and gangs such as the South China Triads, Japan's yakuza and the Qing Bang (Green Gang) of old Shanghai; their ties to law enforcement and governments; and roles in variously thwarting or promoting political change. It is a pleasure to read an exciting work on an exciting topic, but there are some flaws. Lintner uses interviews and published sources well, but seems to have done little archival research. Some fine, better-documented works cover aspects of the topic: on Java, R. Cribb, "Gangsters & Revolutionaries;" B. Martin, "The Shanghai Green Gang;" and Pan Ling, "Old Shanghai," by a native of the city. Maps would greatly aid in understanding a vast geographical area, and illustrations are sorely missed (wouldn't you like to see how Huang, Du and Kwoi got their names?) Finally, Lintner's grim, brutal tales may induce creeping paranoia and depression among readers. "Blood Brothers" is hardly uplifting but still very worthwhile.

Tremendous.......2003-11-22

This book is simply tremendous. It provides a rare glimpse of a magnificent lost world, one I never imagined existed. It lifts the slimy rock of civilization and shows you the teeming throngs underneath. Enter 1930's Shanghai, a city with three governments, French, British and Chinese, each with their own laws, so that someone could rob a man in one part of the city, flee down the street and escape prosecution. It was a place where the chief of police was also China's most notorious gangster. Enter a world of secret societies, pimps, hustlers, hookers in high collared silk gowns split up to their thighs, gangsters who traced their origins to the Shoalin temples, gamblers, ravenous opium smokers, pirates and every other form of low life. Relive a time where a government fought two wars to force another country to do drugs, rather than ban them. All in all a fabulously researched, well written book that paints a vivid picture of bawdy times you didn't read about in history class. Maybe if they had taught this in history, it would have been a heck of a lot more fun.

Great Survey of Roots of Asian Crime & Its Political Ties.......2003-07-07

Lintner does a good job of providing the reader with a basic understanding of the roots behind many of the predominant crime syndicates found in Asia today. The chapters are basically separated by country, although there are cross-references throughout the book. "Blood Brothers" does not cover all of the countries in Asia, and the biggest emphasis is on the Chinese "Triads" and their derivative influences across the globe. Although the text gets kind of slow sometimes with the abundance of naming and terminology used, this book should be a great resource for anyone interested in studying crime in Asia. Overall, the book is a very valuable and well-written study of the Asian underworld and its implications for global governing and U.S. foreign policy.

Underworld (Star Wars: The Last of the Jedi, Book 3)

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Explore the underbelly of Coruscant
WARNING = this is a Kids book. Not a normal star wars novel!
"Underworld" is incredible!
A Great Edition to the Series
Another Wonderful Book

Underworld (Star Wars: The Last of the Jedi, Book 3)
Jude Watson
Manufacturer: Scholastic Paperbacks
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Action & Adventure | Literature | Children's Books | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 0439681367

Book Description

The Empire has taken over the galaxy. Anakin Skywalker is now Darth Vader. Most of the Jedi are gone . . . . . . but a few remain. And it is up to former Jedi apprentice Ferus Olin and his streetsmart sidekick Trever to find them. No lead is too big or too small . . . even if it means walking into a trap set by the Empire.

Customer Reviews:

Explore the underbelly of Coruscant.......2007-04-30

Over the years, Jude Watson has consistently turned out stories with action, adventure and a surprising amount of depth. These books may be written for 9-year-olds, but they can be enjoyed by Star Wars fans of all ages.

In this installment, Ferus Olin's quest to find Jedi survivors takes him to the very depths of Coruscant where he searches to find a mysterious place known as Solace. The book's cliffhanger ending will whet your appetite for book #4.

WARNING = this is a Kids book. Not a normal star wars novel!.......2007-01-24

WARNING = this is a Kids book. Not a normal star wars novel!

"Underworld" is incredible!.......2006-04-09

What a great continuation to the series! We get to go back to Coruscant and travel through her underbelly where those who don't want to be found go. Ferus is once again on his hunt to rescue a missing Jedi. But this time he'll have the help of Obi-Wan's old friend Dexter. What he finds is quite unexpected. Here we see where a true Jedi's loyalty lies. There's more action and adventure to be found in this story. You won't be able to put this book down!

A Great Edition to the Series.......2006-02-15

Underworld
The Last of the Jedi #3
-by Jude Watson

The Story
Ferus and Trever are trying to save a Jedi who is rumored to be held prisoner in the Jedi Temple. Ferus was a Jedi, once, and resigned. However, now he's trying to become a Jedi again. Trever wants to stay with Ferus and refuses every chance to leave.

The two sneak into the Jedi temple and try to evade stromtroopers, who work for the tyrraninal emperor. Ferus doesn't only try to fight the stormtroopers in the temple but also his feelings and memories from when he was a Jedi.

As they look for a possible prison in the Temple, they find that the rumors are made to lead surviving Jedi into traps. There really was no captive Jedi. Ferus and Trever flee the temple hastily.

Ferus and Trever meet, soon afterwards, and old friend Dexter Jettster. Dex has joined a group called the Eraced, which helps people disappear from the Empire. He tells them that one Jedi went to the crust after talking to him and said that if he ever needed her, he should look for Solace.

Then, part of the Erased, Ferus, and Trever go to find Solace, a place rumored to be on or even underneath the crust of Coruscant (the crust is the lowest level on the planet).

Finally, under the crust, they find a guide to lead them to Solace, but Ferus feels that there is something off. Will Ferus discover what that is, or will it be too late?

Recommendations
This book is greatly written and anyone who has read the first two Last of the Jedi books should read it. I loved it and read it at least four times, if not more. I can't wait for the next book to come out.

Another Wonderful Book .......2005-12-13

Jude Watson paints such a vivid picture in your mind. It picks up right where #2 left off Ferus is standing in the rain staring at the Jedi Temple. You feel every emotion Ferus is going through. When he and Trever are going throw the Temple it is heartbreaking. Ferus is still looking for another Jedi which leads him far down below where other of Palpatine's enemies have fled too. You get a very good idea how things are in this new Empire. A better picture of the relationship between Vader and Malorum. When you get to the last page of the book your dying to get a hold of the next book in the series.

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Hades
Thus, Thus It Is A Pleasure To Go Beneath The Shades
Mortality is fatal ! A down to earth approach to dreams.
A masterpiece of Depth Psychology.
Builds on, and refutes, established dream theories.

Dream & the Underworld
James Hillman
Manufacturer: Harper Paperbacks
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Dreams | Mental Health | Health, Mind & Body | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 0060906820

Book Description

In a deepening of the thinking begun in The Myth of Analysis and Re-Visioning Psychology, James Hillman develops the first new view of dreams since Freud and Jung.

Customer Reviews:

Hades.......2004-05-26

While this book is somewhat difficult to read due to it's intensity of style, it represents a radical departure in the art of dream interpretation. If one picks up its clues, one's understanding of the world of dream will deepen far beyond the usual run of the mill dream analysis methods used in modern psychotherapy for ego development. This book deserves to be studied carefully. The author's references and allusions to the Greek and Egyptian ideas of soul are very significant.

Thus, Thus It Is A Pleasure To Go Beneath The Shades.......2003-06-11

Originally written and published for the 42nd edition of the Eranos Yearbook in 1972, controversial psychologist James Hillman's The Dream And The Underworld (1975) will appeal initially to general readers and students of psychology who have found Freud's and Jung's theories on dreams less than fully persuasive. Unfortunately, Hillman's rather unpleasant book is imprecise and often moves strictly in circles; by its conclusion, many readers may feel that the book's murky argument could have been more convincingly stated in several succinct paragraphs. Written in a style that owes much more to Jung than to Freud, Hillman bases his discussion on early philosophical commentary on Egyptian and Greek mythology, apparently forgetting that neither the writings of Heraclitus, Aristotle, or Plato nor the mythologies themselves are verities, facts, or scientific conclusions. Unlike the best of Jung's writing, readers will seldom get the impression that Hillman has committed himself the kind of practical, empirical busywork that Jung dedicated his life to performing.

Amplifying what he feels is correct in Freud and Jung, Hillman also attempts to scrupulously document the point where each of his famous predecessors went astray. However, Hillman's summaries of their dream theories are both airy and vapid, making it almost impossible to discern whether his argument, which builds on theirs, is truly a viable one. Readers may come away from The Dream And The Underworld with little ability to judge whether the book has any merit whatsoever or is simply another example of intellectual or academic harum - scarum. Clear, grounded, and rationally argued Hillman's book is not.

Hillman believes - or appears to believe - that the realm of the unconscious is a "dead" world whose contents, including dreams, have little if anything to do with conscious reality and the "daylight" world of the living. Thus, in his view, the unconscious is the grim, almost barren home of the archetypes and the more bloodless of the daimons, those pure embodiments of the psyche that are primarily concerned not with the fulfillment of the individual's destiny (as in Jung), but with the soul's exclusive preoccupation with death itself. Hillman also sees the unconscious as base, static, and subhuman rather than as transcendent: in his view, it is both pathological and sociopathic, and, for this reason among others, is incapable of actively having anything to do with the vitality of human existence or even of being understood in terms of human reality. Hillman goes so far as to suggest that human consciousness (and identity, personality) may be the naive tip of the psychic iceberg, a mere and unimportant reflection of the more fundamental if alien and ultimately unknowable pure state of the sterile, timeless inner realm. How readers are to apply the author's theory constructively to their own experiences and dream memories is one question among many the book leaves unanswered. Where the metaphorical "truth" of a particular mythology or philosophy ends and its reality as a psychic fact begins is another.

Can the unconscious, envisioned as rich, oceanic, and primordial by Jung, really be more accurately "re - visioned" as an icy, brittle, utterly lightless abode of merciless "shades," like the land of the dead portrayed in Ursula Le Guinn's 1972 novel The Farthest Shore? If Hillman is correct, how did human feeling, much less human consciousness and raw instinct, ever arise from this dead and deathless abyss? The birth of consciousness presupposes a kind of evolutionary chain, a process Hillman's hypothesis pointedly ignores. Even when taken strictly in terms of its all - important image theory, The Dream And The Underworld is negatively distinguished by an absence of missing links.

There are enough flashes of brilliance in The Dream And The Underworld to convince its audience that Hillman, a best - selling author, is about to make an important theoretical breakthrough at any moment. But instead of keen intuitive deduction and perceptive erudition, in each case Hillman heads off on another tangent or takes up the thread of a previously addressed argument for the third or fourth time in as many chapters. Those readers who believe both Freud and Jung were only partially correct (or entirely incorrect) will very likely come away from the odd, static The Dream And The Underworld disappointed, irritated, and questioning the book's uncertain reputation as an important contribution to the field of dream psychology.

Mortality is fatal ! A down to earth approach to dreams........2001-01-27

I have written in the cover of this book:

"This is the book of Hillman's I have been waiting for. After his 'Facing the Gods", "The Myth of Analysis", "Puer Papers", "A Blue Fire" and getting little entrees from each, finally here is the main meal."

I came to this book from the wastelands of clinical depression rather than dreams but recognised immediately the realm of soul here described by Hillman. He suggests that dreams are messengers or reminders of soul and thus of our mortality, of (our) death; a healthy antidote to the 'immortality' syndrome to which we are all prone until we live through a life threatening illness or crisis.

I must admit to reading this book somewhat 'impressionistically' without necessarily trying to follow his arguments, but even then, the impression was compelling. Without a classical training I had to infer the meaning of a lot of the greek words he uses (eg. telos, phrenes, thymos, topos) from the context. I'm still not entirely clear as to their meaning even now. A glossary would have been useful for lay readers, though I don't think they were necessarily the target audience. I have yet to find a layman's glossary or dictionary of Jungian and Archetypal Psychological terms. Certainly my education has been broadened.

Why haven't we heard more of this approach in the popular books on dreams ? It is original, compelling and as cogent as any other approach to interpreting dreams. Is it so 'down to earth' that we would rather cling to the 'fantasy' of approaches that massage our egos a little more.

A masterpiece of Depth Psychology........2001-01-27

Many readers may be familiar with James A. Hillman's best selling "The Soul's Code." As a best seller, that was within the genre of popular psychology. "The Dream and the Underworld," however deals with the area within psychology of "depth psychology." Our present culture is a milieu in which psychology and psychiatry deal with matters such as biopsychiatry, psychopharmacology, brief psychotherapy, quick fixes. A lot of this climate has to do with third party payments, either by an insurer or an Employee Assistance Plan. A qualified psychiatrist or clinical psychologist may often use Depth Psychology in conjunction with the prescription of medications where time and money are not an issue. Depth psychology seeks to treat the causes of a psychiatric disorder rather than just provide relief from the symptoms. Dream analysis is an art, or science, that has a long-respected history dating back to Biblical times. More recently, it has been the subject of extensive writing by 20th century psychiatrists such as Freud and Jung.

I struggled with the writings of both Freud and Jung on dreams in university courses, having found that they did not read all that well. Rather than say that I follow a particular school of psychological theory, I like the more pragmatic approach of taking what is meaningful from those that I read. Hillman's thesis for "The Dream and the Underworld" is briefly outlined in Chapter 1. It is more like the opening statement that a lawyer might make in presenting a case rather than the abstract that a psychologist might write at the beginning of a journal article. Hillman does not rely on repression or compensation, but deals with the dream in relation with the soul and the soul with death. In the context used by Hillman, the "soul" takes on a meaning that equates to the human "psyche" but with a quasi-religious quality. You should not take Hillman's concept of the soul as necessarily being the same as the soul discussed at church or Sunday school. To study the soul, we must go deep. The study of the soul (going back to the Greek origins of the word "psychology") implies a journey into the depths of the soul.

Classical Greek and Roman literature locates the dreams in the House of Hades. Hillman uses images to begin in this mythological underworld. In many ways, it is similar to his "Pan and the Nightmare." He emphasizes both observation and the insight that follows from drawing of inferences from the metaphor of the myth. This is not a "how to" book. There is an emphasis on the analysis of the dream as a modality of therapy, however, in other pieces of Hillman's writings, he posits the concept that "self therapy" is not effective. One of the essential things Hillman emphasizes is that we should be aware of our dreams. Although not actually so stated, there would be an advantage to keeping a journal where the subject logs his/her dreams. I feel that "The Dream and the Underworld" provides a road map to a greater level of self understanding.

Builds on, and refutes, established dream theories........2000-09-09

Hillman wrote this book in the mid-seventies, and it is surprising to me how little effect it seems to have had on the various schools of dream interpretation. Perhaps this is because Hillman's "underworld" is an ambiguous, sometimes frightening place, a place where each psyche is rooted into the Beyond, and where daytime morality has no dominion. The underworld and its dreams contribute to the making of Soul, and are not to be used as helps to fix up our daytime life. To do so is an act of exploitation. This clearly is at odds with our culture's fixation on mining one's dreams for images, ideas, information that can help us be more productive and functional players in the status quo world we inhabit during waking hours.

Hillman carefully develops his ideas through looking at the work of Freud, Jung, and other twentieth century dream workers. He winnows out the wheat from the chaff, and uses the wheat to thrust dream interpretation forward, and farther away from the safe, cozy realm the ego would so much like to stay wrapped up in. One gets the feeling reading this book that safety does not a strong soul make.

Being an inveterate "miner" of dreams myself, I was at first rather resistant to Hillman's thesis. Eventually, though, I came around to his point of view (with reservations), mainly because I realized that dreams and soulwork are very much like art. Just as art should not be made for any practical "daytime" use, so with our souls and dream images.

Book Description

No previous age was better equipped than the Victorian period, with its new system of shorthand and its cameras, to bring the present alive in the future. Here, through the eyes of its inhabitants, Donald Thomas portrays London's 19th-century underworld, which was sheltered by an underclass and united with it in a hatred of the police. In its enclaves near the fashionable West End thrived thieves and beggars, pornographers and pickpockets, white slavers and murderers, who preyed on rich and poor alike. In The Victorian Underworld, Donald Thomas pushes open the door of a strange, and strangely familiar, world. Donald Thomas is a distinguished biographer and novelist; his life of Robert Browning was a runner-up for the Whitbread Award.

Customer Reviews:

HISTORY WITHOUT GLOSS.......2002-01-27

When historians create their tomes they glorify and even fabricate information in order to make their nation appear as prolific as possible. "Victorian Underworld" is a view of this era of Britain's history that is rarely, if ever, exhibited. It is an overview of the conditions of the underclass, of which, in all contemporary nations are the largest portion of the population. "Victorian England" concentrates on the manner in which the bulk of the population, the 'commoners' either lived their lives or the obstacles the public endeavoured to avoid. The writing style is as enticing as grand fiction which brings an air of titillation to this factual documentation of history.

Crime and justice in Victorian England.......1999-12-02

Readers of British social history might enjoy this work. The first half ("Crime") draws very heavily--perhaps too heavily--from the works of 19th-century writer Henry Mahew. (Oddly, the Amazon listing shows Mahew as co-author, but he is not listed as co-author in the book itself.) We're treated to a detailed description of slum living conditions, criminal scams of the era, cheating on horse races, early pornography, and prostitution. A variety of detailed narratives give the book a personal touch; it's not dry reading. The most astonishing tidbit in this book is that in Victorian London, there was a ratio of one prostitute for every ten adult males!

The second half of the book ("Retribution") covers the jails of the era, police corruption, hangings of wrongly convicted people, and the workings of the court system, spiced with a variety of narratives about actual people. On the other hand, the most irritating feature of the book is that the index lists only names of persons, not topics.

Survival of the Fittest.......1999-02-22

What a relief to sit comfortably ensconsed in a different century! The author points out the cruelty of everyday life under the reign of Queen Victoria and the futility of the struggle to survive. It should be a lesson to all of us nowadays when we complain about the tough life we have to endure.We have come a long way! While the narration certainly is very interesting, it also seems curiously flat and without a lively soul. Maybe that stems from the fact that much of the book has a few sources only and just seems to copy them. Also, the back and forth of the time frame makes it somewhat incoherent. It would have helped a great deal to include a few maps of London.

IT ELOQUENTLY PORTAYS ATMOSPHERE AND INTENCE EMMOTION........1998-10-03

AS AN AVID VICTORIAN FAN I FOUND MYSELF HYPNOTIZED BY THE SWIRL OF HISTORICAL DRAMA.

The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld

Average customer rating:

Too good to be true
If you liked the movie then you'll LOVE this book
Gangs of New York
A classic, ruined by the film
An Example of Nativist Bigotry

The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld
Herbert Asbury
Manufacturer: Thunder's Mouth Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Social History | Historical Study | History | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 1560252758

Book Description

The Gangs of New York has long been hand-passed among its cult readership. It is a tour through a now unrecognizable city of abysmal poverty and habitual violence cobbled, as Luc Sante has written, “from legend, memory, police records, the self-aggrandizements of aging crooks, popular journalism, and solid historical research.” Asbury presents the definitive work on this subject, an illumination of the gangs of old New York that ultimately gave rise to the modern Mafia and its depiction in films like The Godfather. “A universal history of infamy [that] contains all the confusion and cruelty of the barbarian cosmologies....”—Jorge Luis Borges “The tale is one of blood, excitement and debauchery.”—The New York Times Book Review “The Gangs of New York is one of the essential works of the city....”—Luc Sante, The New York Review of Books

Customer Reviews:

Too good to be true.......2007-05-09

Herbert Asbury has developed in this book a delightfully readable (and read-out-loudable) history of the dark underbelly of New York City--the picaresque and downright nasty underground of gambling tongs, gang warfare and thorough political corruption.

I of course came to this book only recently, after having seen the Scorsese film of the same name. It is in fact quite wonderful to see the liberties Scorsese took to make a challenging film and not just a recapping of this oral-style history. Familiar names and events and places appear in the mist, but in a whole new context. This book will let you know that the incredible Scorsese movie merely scratches the surface of the NYC underworld from the Civil War era to the start of the 20th dentury, if this book is to be believed.

It is this last point that gives me some pause about this book. As I said before, this book is eminently readable and enjoyable. The webs of rivalry and alliance, of rumbles that go on for hours, riots that go on for days, tales of violence and retribution and a host of characters whose corruption and indulgence o'ershadow even the prohibition days of Chicago. Asbury freely admits when some of his tales are mere folklore, stories that criminals pass along to each other as legends, drastically overexaggerrated to confer the level of respect of awe that a gang leader or significant change of the balance of power has earned.

But sometimes it's hard to believe the level of reliable research that could have gone into so many other ta1es. The histories of particular criminals are detailed down to their dismemberment by cannon fire in the Civil War, or their miserable ends to cowardly ambush or the breaking of spirits after a particularly bad loss of business or to a mightier opponent, or to their incarceration, and the mug shots are wonderfully stylish, but it is hard to stomach easily the thoroughness of the information, unless Asbury was a devotee of the Five Corners and other such areas of ill-repute in its heyday. No doubt there was prodigious information provided by police records and other data, but perhaps this is a book to be taken more as a work of social anthropology than history--an examination of the underworld culture of NYC in this time period rather than a necessarily accurate historical document. One part bragging, another part horror, and a wonderful gaze at the debaucheries of the ale houses and gambling establishments down Asbury's nose in a way that seems sometimes sincere, sometimes a little over the top for the sake of appearances, this book is worth the read, especially to spread stories to others...just don't accept it readily as 'fact.'

If you liked the movie then you'll LOVE this book.......2006-12-14

I enjoyed the movie, but I truly loved this book. The book is better than the movie,for sure. Worth the price. Easy to read. I wasn't able to put it down!

Gangs of New York.......2006-11-29

This is an interesting history of gangs in New York City from the mid 1800's to I believe somewhere around the early 1920's. Talks about the many street battles and colorful characters, some of which seem to border on being folklore. These guys were legitimate hand to hand tough guys, not like the later weasely mafia types that would have somebody else shoot you in the back. These guys would fight it out themselves in the streets, in fact some of the guys talked about in this book were among the top bare knuckle boxers of their day and are featured prominently in a history of bare knuckle boxing book that I have.

A classic, ruined by the film.......2006-11-18

An account of the gangsters of NYC from the earliest days. There is some amazing untold history here. One which really struck me was the stories of the draft riots in NYC of the civil war. Apparently there was a $300 draft exemption whereby the well to do could get out of being turned into lunch meat in the civil war. It didn't go over well with the working class Irish in the city, who revolted (about 1/10 of the population was actively involved in the several days of riots) and made a huge mess of the place. Lots of interesting tidbits about river pirates, "the dead rabbit gang" (they marched under the banner of an impaled rabbit; "rabbit" incidentally, had numerous double entendres in those days which no longer exist), Monk Eastman, Dopey Benny, the Gopher gang, Bill the Butcher, Lupo the Wolf and other notorious gangsters from the beginning of NYC until the 1920s. This stuff makes the Mafia look like nice orderly guys.

The book is written in the yellow journalistic style of its day, which I personally find charming and a refreshing change from the bland melange of moralizing pieties we get as writing on such subjects now a days. Others may disagree with my tastes, but it is unquestionable this is an artifact of its era.

I read this some years before the film came out, and am in retrospect very happy indeed that I did so. The film has nothing to do with the book, other than taking a few characters and props from the book, and bloating them into a ridiculous Hollywood costume abomination. The book is a treasure for people who are interested in gangs and underworlds of previous generations. Far more than today, the gangs provided the social infrastructure of lower class societies in those days. The fact that only a few artifacts of these eras survive makes books like this quite wonderful time capsules.

An Example of Nativist Bigotry.......2006-11-14

A writer for the Irish Echo said this book should have been titled "The Protocols of the Elders of Erin." It was written around the time Al Smith was running for president and appealed to the nativist, anti-Catholic prejudices of upstate New York and America at that time. While there really were gangs in that era, most of New York's immigrants were busy building hospitals and schools like St. Vincent's, Fordham, St. John's, Manhattan and Manhattanville. The vast majority of the city's population including its immigrants didn't riot in 1863. In fact New York City's 200,000 soldiers and sailors, more than half of whom were immigrants, won over 100+ Medals of Honor during America's Civil War.

It's a tribute to the persistence of prejudice that this book isn't more widely recognized as the nasty practical joke that it is.

Wages Of Crime: Black Markets, Illegal Finance, And The Underworld Economy

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cornell press
Political diatribe masquerading as scholarly work
A Marxist perspective on Black Market issues
recomended
A better understanding of Black Markets than regulators have

Wages Of Crime: Black Markets, Illegal Finance, And The Underworld Economy
R. T. Naylor
Manufacturer: Cornell University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0801489601

Book Description

"Never in history has there been a black market tamed from the supply side. From Prohibition to prostitution, from gambling to recreational drugs, the story is the same. Supply-side controls act to encourage production and increase profits. At best a few intermediaries get knocked out of business. But as long as demand persists, the market is served more or less as before. In the meantime, failure to `win the war' [against crime] becomes a pretext for increasing police budgets, expanding law enforcement powers, and pouring more money into the voracious maw of the prison-industrial complex."—from the Introduction

R. T. Naylor specializes in the study of smuggling, black markets, and international financial crime. Wages of Crime takes the reader into the shadowy underworld of modern criminal business—arms trafficking, gold smuggling, money laundering, and terrorist financing. Naylor dissects the schemes by which illegal entrepreneurs disguise their acts, manage their take, and eventually enjoy the loot. The author asserts that much of what police, press, politicians, and the public understand about international crime is based on myth and misrepresentation.

Wages of Crime also outlines Naylor's claim that some of the most popular modern law-enforcement fads are inefficient or useless and can do massive damage in eroding civil liberties. In the wake of recent tragedies, Naylor's criticisms of contemporary anticrime policies and the confounding of criminal and national security issues have a sharper resonance.

Customer Reviews:

cornell press.......2007-06-10

Multi faceted and objective look at the underworld economy.
Many statitistics and and overwhelming amount of detailed historical
information. Some sources not sited in what could appear to be
biased editorializations, but these observations are few and far in
between. All in all a great overview.

Political diatribe masquerading as scholarly work.......2006-07-31

When I picked up Wages of Crime, I was hoping to find an objective presentation and debate on the the value of anti-money laundering policies and law enforcement trends. Instead, Naylor, without providing any evidence, reaches conclusions that suit only his own political agenda, which he pretty much makes clear throughout the book. His tone is wholly one sided and dismissive. It's perhaps a good thing that the author reverts to childlike plays on names and other amateurish techniques to support his arguments, for by doing so, he allows the reader to easily dismiss most of what he has to say. Examples of name calling include this sentence: "Hence, advised by neo-con artists crafting its foreign policy...". Neo-con artists. How clever. Or in this passage where he describes the many wonderful things he thinks Hizbullah has done, he includes: "rebuilding houses gratuitously destroyed by Israeli bombs and shells". This book is anything but a serious, unbiased study of the issues.

If you do a Google on Naylor, the first link brings you to an interview where Naylor gets right down to business in the very first question. His answer tells you all you need to know about what you might read from Wages of Crime: "Al Queda itself does not exist, except in the fevered imaginations of neo-cons and Likudniks, some of whom, I suspect, also know it is a myth, but find it extremely useful as a bogeyman to spook the public and the politicians to acquiesce in otherwise unacceptable policy initiatives at home and abroad."

A Marxist perspective on Black Market issues.......2006-06-29

This book on the black market makes a case for going back to views popular in the 1960s. In the 1960s, the black market was populated with cold-war spies and gun running free-booters. Since then, the popular press has painted the black market as a drug running paradise. Naylor tries to convince us this image is a lie. The real black market criminals are capitalist executives in the military-industrial complex. Defined in this manner, 'Wages of Crime' becomes a traditional left wing vehicle for brow beating those unwilling to genuflect before Marxist-Leninist dogma. This critique is not limited to attacks on the US political establishment. At one point Naylor laments that Gorbachev's generation 'forgot its ideological roots'. On another page, Naylor describes the proletarian interests in South East Asia.

The reader won't find the standard pulp crime stories here, which is a blessing. Unfortunately, the book relies on rhetorical flourish rather than statistics. Thus, it simply substitutes one stereotype with a second.

The text was pulled from independent articles, so the flow is sometimes uneven. For example, a chapter seeking to debunk the political might of heroin/cocaine dealers tries to convince the reader that drugs are of marginal economic importance. He complains that the published estimates of drug dealer wealth are too high by perhaps a factor of 100. In another chapter, rich drug dealers engage in crimes with military-industrial complex.

recomended.......2006-02-17

I really think this book gives a great inside in to the economics of ilegal activities.

A better understanding of Black Markets than regulators have.......2006-01-11

R.T. Naylor has a better understanding of illicit markets, than most regulators have. He has obviously done extensive research, on the mechanics of money laundering for example, and knows the legitimate banking system, as well as the underground financial system. I suspect his thesis that organized crime is a myth, may be quite controversial. Nonetheless, he backs up his statements with convincing arguments. The only reason, I did not rate this book 5 stars, is that he slips in his political viewpoints, that are decidedly left of center. As an example, when speaking of Republican congressman Henry Hyde's attempt to reform how banks report questionable transactions to the government, he states, "And for a time, Representative Hyde shifted his energies to more pressing matters, leading the abortive move to impeach Bill Clinton-not because Clinton had gutted the social welfare system, capitulated to the medical establishment on health care, or committed mass murder in Iraq but because of his idiosyncratic taste in custom flavored cigars". (pp.277)These types of gratuitous statements, while rare in this book, take away some of the force of the dilemma most Western countries face in dealing with an underground economy. Still, this is an excellent book, that reads like a college textbook, with priceless insights on offshore banking, money laundering, the underworld gold economy, crime control, and other topics. I strongly suggest this book, as a social commentary of the black market and undergorund economy.

The Last Madam: A Life in the New Orleans Underworld

Average customer rating:

What Sass!
The Last Madam
The Last Madam: A Life in the New Orleans Underworld
They just don't make 'em like Norma anymore
Great Subject Matter, Mediocre Execution

The Last Madam: A Life in the New Orleans Underworld
Chris Wiltz , and Christine Wiltz
Manufacturer: Da Capo Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0306810123

Amazon.com

Actually, they called themselves "landladies" in New Orleans, though that didn't change the nature of their business: running houses of prostitution in the city's wide-open French Quarter. Beginning in 1920, when she was still in her teens, Norma Wallace managed a high-class bordello for an affluent and influential clientele, evading the police and asserting her sexual freedom "like a man" despite the nominal confines of several rickety marriages. Obsessive love for a man 39 years her junior and her first-ever jail term finally put Wallace out of the business in the mid-1960s, but her memories were still vivid and raunchy when she tape-recorded material for an autobiography in the two years before her suicide in 1974. Novelist Christine Wiltz makes good use of those recordings in an earthy narrative filled with great anecdotes, from how the name of Wallace's dog became local slang for an out-of-town customer to the time an undertaker's premises served as her temporary place of business. Wiltz also interviewed many of Wallace's lovers and associates; she draws on popular journalism and scholarly monographs with equal acuity to flesh out Norma's story. Her perceptive biography of a colorful and complex woman is equally satisfying as a social history of 20th-century New Orleans. --Wendy Smith

Customer Reviews:

What Sass!.......2007-07-23

I simply enjoyed reading this! Women empower themselves and who's to say what we can do, given circumstance! What a sassy Dame!

The Last Madam.......2007-06-18

I wasn't expecting for this book to be written in the style that it is written. But it is so full of information about New Orleans, some of the people who lived there during this particular era where Norma Wallace reigned supreme. I found it to be interesting, a very good read. If you have any interest in New Orleans, you will enjoy this book.

The Last Madam: A Life in the New Orleans Underworld.......2007-02-13

A fast paced, intimate look at the life of Norman Wallace. Easy to read with historical interest and local details. Gives the true flavor of the area and the time.

They just don't make 'em like Norma anymore.......2006-08-21

This is an interesting story of the passing of an era in New Orleans history, well-written and factual. Norma's business introduced many young college students at Tulane and LSU in the art of what to do when "doing it", as well as servicing influential politicians, businessmen, and movie stars in her well-run facility. Norma was the ultimate "street smart" madam who could survive and thrive in this business serving both sides of the street. But for her tragic demise there could have been many more stories of her interesting life she could have told. This book is a teaser for what could have been.

Great Subject Matter, Mediocre Execution.......2006-02-04

While I commend the author for undertaking what must have been a difficult project given the time elapsed and the "off the record" nature of the subject matter, the book could have been better organized and more carefully paced to present a coherent sense of Norma Wallace and her life and times. Instead it often feels jumbled, disjointed, and uneven, with certain sections of the narrative rather jarringly misplaced. Overall, however, the subject matter is fascinating enough to hold one's attention and the glimpses through the peephole into a simultaneously glamorous and seedy aspect of New Orleans history are intriguing.

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