Empire Rising

Empire Rising by Thomas Kelly. I'm a sucker for the period of time covered in this book. It's about New York in the 30s -- the depression, prohibition, Tammany Hall. A time of the declining influence of the immigrant Irish and the rising influence of the immigrant Italian -- in both politics and crime. In this really excellent book, Boss Tweed and even Silent Charlie Murphy are long gone. The clownish Jimmy Walker holds the mayor's office.

The book focuses on a couple of recent Irish immigrants -- an iron worker named Mike Briody and a young bohemian woman named Grace. Mike operates a rivet hammer and is one of the crews laying the frame for the Empire State Building. In the story, the building is the slightly heavy handed, if apt, symbol of the new New York rising out of the old. Even the construction workers who fall off the structure to their death are symbolic of the many deaths in the beer wars and the painful transistion from one set of controlling organizations to another.

In this book, you'll not only see the Tammany driven way that graft and corruption operate in New York, you'll also see how the war for Irish freedom moved across the Atlantic Ocean in the early decades of the century. You'll see godfather-like gangsters try to find their way out of the life as a new generation of even more ruthless underworld characters take over.

I've read enough history of this period to come believing that, while only some of the stories in the book are based on actual events, nevertheless Kelly did his research. You learn a lot about the flavor of the times, while enjoying a great page-turner of a story. Highly recommended!