Reviews

The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss by Margalit Fox

oceanwriter's review

adventurous informative medium-paced

3.5

I’m always curious to learn about different people, places, and periods in history that I have little to no knowledge of. In the case of The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum, I went in with absolutely no foreknowledge. In general, I’m not super well-versed in the era of the 1800s. 

 

The book discusses the rags-to-riches life story of Frederika Mandelbaum. Starting out as a peddler, she ended up with ties to the underworld and ultimately became an entrepreneur. With 19th Century New York as a backdrop, the book offers not only a biography of Mrs. Mandelbaum, but also a look at the climate of the times. The book is rich with photographs which add to the atmosphere. 

 

While I found the topic interesting and I was taken with the setting, I didn’t latch onto Fredericka. The book had a tendency to stray, so maybe that was a contributing factor for me even though I did find the side players interesting as well. The topics of the book were another reason I struggled to connect on a personal level. 

 

Overall, the research is solid and is presented well. A good read for history lovers! 

 

A huge thanks to Random House and NetGalley for inviting me to read a digital ARC of the book! 

kleonard's review against another edition

4.0

This is a fascinating account of Fredericka Mandelbaum, who ran an enormous empire of stolen goods and was the money behind various bank heists in the New York of the so-called Gilded Age, when economic disparity grew by leaps and bounds. Fox chronicles Mandelbaum--aka "Marm"--from her arrival in New York to her flight to Canada after being arrested, recounting Marm's training of thieves, her rivals in organized crime, and her upper-crust social life as a hostess to judges and others in the social elite. Some of the quotes run a little long, but I appreciate the context Fox gives for Marm's activities. The title of the book and the titles of several chapters refer to current pop culture and will draw in some readers, but may not age well. i realize that Fox uses Mandelbaum's first name in order not to have pages and pages full of "Marm" and "Mandelbaum," but authors have traditionally used women's first names and men's last names as a way of showing the relative importance of them; I prefer that everyone is called by their last name, only using first names when there is the possibility of confusion, although here, "Marm" is clear and doesn't diminish Mandelbaum.

tessisreading2's review against another edition

informative mysterious medium-paced

4.0

Really interesting biography of a woman of whom I’d never heard - an immigrant Jewish lady crime lord in Gilded Age New York? Sign me up right now. This is very much one of those biographies which is “life and times” more than it is a personal biography - personal information about Mandelbaum comes from public interviews, court proceedings, and other people; she didn’t exactly leave papers or a memoir lying around - but Fox (unsurprisingly, given her past as an obituary writer) does well pulling all that information together into a cohesive, engaging whole. We learn not only about Mandelbaum but about how her crime empire functioned, and the ways in which she both exploited and was exploited by New York’s notorious nineteenth-century corruption. It was interesting and fun to read, absolutely the kind of book I’ll be recommending to friends and aunts for the next year or so. 

That said, if I never read “a historian has written” again it will probably be too soon; Fox quotes extensively and loves, loves, loves that construction. Can’t she just say “wrote?” Evidently not. And while on the one hand I appreciate how meticulously she sourced all of her quotations, on the other, I really wished she would paraphrase more often, if only to get rid of all those quotation tags - they felt really obtrusive by the end. Minor complaint? Absolutely. Did it bug me? Also yes. 

Disclaimer: I received an ARC for free, but this review contains my own, honest assessment of the book.

smdorsett's review

3.0

Some pacing issues and at times repetitive but still a fascinating story—very cinematic.