tony's review
3.0
I found this book quite frustrating at times. The story is fascinating, and the author clearly knows the subject intimately, having written about Cahill, and the Irish underworld more generally, for many years for the Sunday World. But, like several other similar books I've read recently, he gets so bogged down in simply getting across so many individual stories, that the overall narrative suffers.
George F. Snell III makes a useful distinction between reporting and journalism, in that the former tells you what happened, whereas the latter tells you why it happened. When it comes to wrapping journalism up in a book like this, however, I tend to prefer those that take the further step of deftly arranging the material into a coherent story, plotted more artfully than a simple "this happened, then this happened, and then this happened" (and doubly so when the author keeps making forward references, and seems to assume you already know a lot of the story.) In the hands of a more skilled story-teller, this could have been a superb book, akin to [b:Ballad of the Whiskey Robber|28805|Ballad of the Whiskey Robber A True Story of Bank Heists, Ice Hockey, Transylvanian Pelt Smuggling, Moonlighting Detectives, and Broken Hearts|Julian Rubinstein|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1407261644s/28805.jpg|953039], but Williams can't quite pull it off.
George F. Snell III makes a useful distinction between reporting and journalism, in that the former tells you what happened, whereas the latter tells you why it happened. When it comes to wrapping journalism up in a book like this, however, I tend to prefer those that take the further step of deftly arranging the material into a coherent story, plotted more artfully than a simple "this happened, then this happened, and then this happened" (and doubly so when the author keeps making forward references, and seems to assume you already know a lot of the story.) In the hands of a more skilled story-teller, this could have been a superb book, akin to [b:Ballad of the Whiskey Robber|28805|Ballad of the Whiskey Robber A True Story of Bank Heists, Ice Hockey, Transylvanian Pelt Smuggling, Moonlighting Detectives, and Broken Hearts|Julian Rubinstein|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1407261644s/28805.jpg|953039], but Williams can't quite pull it off.
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