A review by tessisreading2
The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss by Margalit Fox

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.