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From the bestselling coauthor of Black Mass, a behind-the-scenes portrait of the Irish power brokers who forged and fractured twentieth-century Boston.
Rogues and Redeemers tells the hidden story of Boston politics—the cold-blooded ward bosses, the smoke-filled rooms, the larger-than-life pols who became national figures: Honey Fitz, the crafty stage Irishman and grandfather to a president; the pugilistic Rascal King, Michael Curley; the hectored Kevin White who tried to hold the city together during the busing crisis; and Ray Flynn, the Southie charmer who was truly the last hurrah for Irish-American politics in the city.
For almost a century, the Irish dominated Boston politics with their own unique, clannish brand of coercion and shaped its future for good and ill. Former Boston Globe investigative reporter Gerard O'Neill takes the reader through the entire journey from the famine ships arriving in Massachusetts Bay to the wresting of power away from the Brahmins of Beacon Hill to the Title I wars of attrition over housing to the rending of the city over busing to the Boston of today—which somehow through it all became a modern, revitalized city, albeit with a growing divide between the haves and have-nots.
Sweeping in its history and intimate in its details, Rogues and Redeemers echoes all the great themes of The Power Broker and Common Ground and should take its place on that esteemed shelf as a classic, definitive epic of a city.
List of Illustrations xi
Chapter 1 famine's progeny 1
2 Shawn A Boo 25
3 The Good Shepherd 47
4 Himself 63
5 The Badger Game 101
6 Whispering Johnny 115
7 All or Nothing 143
8 Baby-faced Assassin 159
9 I Am a Legend 185
10 Whither Boston 209
11 Maybe Not Wendell from Worcester 241
12 Halloween Massacre 279
13 Losing Ground 307
14 Still Broke 333
Epilogue 369
Acknowledgments 377
Notes 379
Index 385
JTO1
Posted March 17, 2012
so well done. agree with thomas o'connor - this will be the next great history of boston classic. great writing, learned a lot, couldn't put it down.
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Posted March 14, 2012
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Overview
From the bestselling coauthor of Black Mass, a behind-the-scenes portrait of the Irish power brokers who forged and fractured twentieth-century Boston.
Rogues and Redeemers tells the hidden story of Boston politics—the cold-blooded ward bosses, the smoke-filled rooms, the larger-than-life pols who became national figures: Honey Fitz, the crafty stage Irishman and grandfather to a president; the pugilistic Rascal King, Michael Curley; the...