Al Capone by Deirdre Bair

Al Capone by Deirdre Bair

From a National Book Award-winning biographer, the first complete life of legendary gangster Al Capone to be produced with the cooperation of his family, who provided the author with exclusive access to personal testimony and archival documents.

From his heyday to the present moment, Al Capone--Public Enemy Number One--has gripped popular imagination. Rising from humble Brooklyn roots, Capone went on to become the most infamous gangster in American history. At the height of Prohibition, his multimillion-dollar Chicago bootlegging, prostitution, and gambling operation dominated the organized-crime scene. His competition with rival gangs was brutally violent, a long-running war that crested with the shocking St. Valentine's Day Massacre of 1929. Law enforcement and the media elite seemed powerless to stop the growth of his empire. And then the fall: a legal noose tightened by the FBI, a conviction on tax evasion, Alcatraz. After his release he returned to his family in Miami a much diminished man, living quietly until the ravages of his neurosyphilis took their final toll. But the slick mobster persona endures, immortalized in countless novels and movies.
The true flesh-and-blood man behind the legend has long remained a mystery. Unscrupulous newspaper accounts and Capone's own tall tales perpetuated his mystique, but through dogged research Deirdre Bair debunks the most outrageous of these myths. With the help of Capone's descendants, she discovers his essential humanity, uncovering a complex character that was flawed and sometimes cruel but also capable of nobility. And while revealing the private Al Capone, a genuine family man as remembered by those who knew him best, Bair relates how his descendants have borne his weighty legacy.
Rigorous and intimate, Al Capone provides new answers to the enduring questions about this fascinating figure, who was equal parts charismatic gangster, devoted patriarch, and calculating monster.

Samuel Beckett: A Biography, written by Deirdre Bair, won the National Book Award. Her biographies of Simone de Beauvoir and Carl Jung were both contenders for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and The New York Times named the Simone de Beauvoir biography a Best Book of the Year. www.deirdrebairauthor.com is a website dedicated to the author Deirdrebair.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780385537155
ISBN 10	0385537158
Title	Al Capone
Author	Deirdre Bair
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Nan A Talese
Year published	2016-10-25
Number of pages	416
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.