For Gangsterland
"Award-wining author David Pietrusza takes readers on a tour through the underbelly of New York City in the 1920s, where the notorious gangsters hung out, ruling much of the city. They're all here: Arnold Rothstein, the kingpin known for fixing the 1919 World Series, the murderous racketeers Lucky Luciano and Legs Diamond, along with the celebrities Flo Ziegfeld, Fanny Brice, and Many Gentleman Jimmy Walker. I felt like Pietrusza took me in a time machine and walked me through the heart of New York City and pointed out who lived there, who was murdered there, and what crime was planned in that building. I learned much, and I look forward to my next visit to the city to explore these locations. This is the perfect gift for that historian on your list."
—Times Union
"An entertaining, sometimes grisly stroll through Gotham’s bad old days."
—Kirkus Reviews
"If you’re interested in the mobsters, grifters, showgirls, corrupt cops, and crooked judges of New York in the 1920s (and it’s hard not to be), Gangsterland is for you. David Pietrusza’s tour of the bars and nightclubs, the floating crap games and bucket shops, the whorehouses and the courtrooms, brings the era’s underworld into vivid light. You can tell that Pietrusza had a blast writing it!"
—Daniel Okrent, author of Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition
“When David Pietrusza walks down the sidewalks of New York, he doesn't see modern skyscrapers and Starbucks coffee shops. Reading Gangsterland you will see what he sees: hideouts, speakeasies, murder sites, and theater stages where the mistresses of both mob bosses and the city's good-time mayor trod the boards. His book gives a literary tour of New York when the Twenties were roaring and reminds us that a single building can have many lives. Fascinating and fun!”
—Kathryn Smith, author of Baptists & Bootleggers: A Prohibition Expedition Through the South…with Cocktail Recipes
“David Pietrusza is a national treasure. Few historians can match his one-two punch of gorgeous prose and deep insight. This combo delivers the kind of haymaker that would have made Jack Dempsey proud. Gangsterland is a true crime heavyweight champ, filled with stories of New York’s seedy past and must-reading for anyone interested in the murder and mayhem of the Roaring Twenties—and who isn’t?”
―Bob Batchelor, cultural historian, author of The Bourbon King: The Life and Crimes of George Remus, Prohibition’s Evil Genius
“David Pietrusza brings history alive like very few authors can. Weaving journalistic accounts together with meticulous research and lively prose, Pietrusza makes it feel as though you’re on a tour right through the heart of Jazz Age Manhattan. I plan to take the book with me next time I’m in Midtown and follow in David’s footsteps, reading each story as I go and imagining the scene from a century ago.”
—Kevin Balfe, Founder of CrimeCon
"Historian Pietrusza (Roosevelt Sweeps Nation) tours 1920s New York City's tawdriest neighborhoods in this comprehensive survey of the stomping grounds of mobsters, bootleggers, and murderers-for-hire. At the center of the story is a gambler and mob kingpin Arnold Rothstein, best known for helping to fix Major League Baseball's 1919 World Series, who had a hand in a wide range of rackets throughout the city. Other characters include Tammany Hall operatives such as "Big" Time Sullivan, featherweight boxing champion Abe Attell, and Fanny Brice, the "Funny Girl" of the Ziegfeld Follies. Pietrusza catalogs and maps out 189 sites of infamy in Manhattan, including Rothstein's gambling house on West 46th Street, madam-to-the-stars Polly Adler's brothel on West 54th Street, and the Park Crescent Hotel on West 87th Street, the site of a 1929 drug bust that netted more than $1 million in cocaine and opium. This encyclopedic account, broken up into bite-size sections, amounts to a roll call of Jazz Age New York's rich and infamous, couched within a tour of the underworld hot spots where they lived and died. ("Few of the characters we meet here end well. Fewer deserve to," Pietrusza writes.) N.Y.C. history buffs should take note."
—Publishers Weekly
Praise for David Pietrusza’s previous work:
Rothstein: The Life, Times and Murder of the Criminal Genius Who Fixed the 1919 World Series
“A terrific job capturing Rothstein’s colorful career [shedding] new light on Rothstein’s role in fixing the World Series. . . .”
—New York Times
“A morsel worth chewing over during the long, dark months between seasons. . . . engaging. Pietrusza’s material puts real flesh on the story of how the new machinery of mass entertainment—the yellow press, movies, radio, the recording industry—created and brought together the culture of celebrity, politics, big-time sports, stock market fortunes and organized crime in the 1920s.”
—Washington Post
Roosevelt Sweeps Nation: FDR’s 1936 Landslide and the Triumph of the Liberal Ideal
“A robust chronicle of Franklin Roosevelt’s quest to stay in the White House. . . . a brisk, spirited narrative, abundantly populated and bursting with anecdotes . . . A prodigiously researched and exuberantly told political biography/history.”
—Kirkus Starred Review
“A sweeping yet minutely detailed chronicle of FDR’s 1936 reelection campaign . . . an exhaustive and expert chronicle of a critical American election.”
—Publishers Weekly
"Presidential scholar Pietrusza (TR's Last War) makes the most of his engrossing tale...A lively story that is rife with strong personalities and blood stirring incidents...History bugs will find this popular history appealing."
—Library Journal
1948: Harry Truman's Improbable Victory and the Year that Transformed America
“A coherent, compelling narrative . . . What the reader learns here is that the long-term veneer that often sticks to political figures always clouds the reality. And understanding what actually transpired is not only more important, but also far more intriguing. A skillful, authoritative investigation into one of the most famous presidential elections in U.S. history.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Sweeping . . . compelling.”
—Library Journal
“David Pietrusza has written a vivid account of President Truman’s unlikely comeback and ultimate victory in the presidential election of 1948. Anyone with an interest in modern American politics or campaign strategy will find many lessons and much enjoyment in this important book.”
—Senator Mitch McConnell
1960: LBJ vs. JFK vs. Nixon―The Epic Campaign That Forged Three Presidencies
“Almost half a century after Theodore White’s The Making of the President, 1960, Pietrusza (1920: The Year of the Six Presidents) raises the bar with his winning and provocative chronicle . . . Highly recommended . . .”
—Library Journal (starred review)
“Pietrusza is not beholden to any of the three candidates . . . a wide-ranging panorama that includes a vast cast of characters . . . An outstanding reexamination.”
—Booklist
“Colorful . . . lively.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Terrific . . . I enjoyed reading it.”
—Pulitzer Prize-winner Robert Caro
2023-09-01
On-the-ground tour of places, extant and extinct, where key episodes in New York’s organized crime history took place.
“Few of the characters we meet here end well. Fewer deserve to….Just don’t turn your back on anyone,” writes Pietrusza at the beginning of this wide-ranging compendium of people and places. It’s good advice, for even if one of those scenes has since become “the much more respectable site of a Whole Foods,” there are still plenty of criminal venues that still stand today—though most have been repurposed. For instance, the old Knickerbocker Hotel, on 42nd Street and Broadway in the heart of today’s theater district, was once a hangout for the gangster Arnold Rothstein (about whom Pietrusza has written a biography), enjoying a dining room captained by a budding restaurateur named Vincent Sardi. Rothstein used the Knickerbocker as a venue for his “high-stakes floating card and craps games,” and the hotel was also, conveniently, where his lawyer kept his office. The Knickerbocker may now be a condominium complex, but the spirits of gangsters and patsies, to say nothing of onetime resident F. Scott Fitzgerald, still hang over the place. Though he made a decent buck arranging such events as the Chicago “Black Sox” throwing of the 1919 World Series, Rothstein was mortally shot at a nearby hotel for, by one account, having run up one too many unpaid debts. As Pietrusza notes in passing, though the World Series scandal took place in Chicago, it was a New York–born scheme—and a New York journalist took the lead in exposing it. William Randolph Hearst, Jimmy Durante, Babe Ruth, W.C. Fields, Damon Runyon: All figure in these spry pages, featuring countless episodes of the bad behavior that New York’s gangland concocted. The book includes a chronology and cast of characters.
An entertaining, sometimes grisly stroll through Gotham’s bad old days.
