Al Capone
  • Published: 15 November 2017
  • ISBN: 9780345804518
  • Imprint: Knopf US
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 416
  • RRP: $39.99
Categories:

Al Capone

His Life, Legacy, and Legend

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

At the height of Prohibition, Al Capone loomed large as Public Enemy Number One: his multimillion-dollar Chicago Outfit dominated organized crime, and law enforcement was powerless to stop him. But then came the fall: a legal noose tightened by the FBI, a conviction on tax evasion, a stint in 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.
 
Our shared fascination with Capone endures in countless novels and movies, but the man behind the legend has remained a mystery. Now, through rigorous research and exclusive access to Capone’s family, National Book Award–winning biographer Deirdre Bair cuts through the mythology, uncovering a complex character who was flawed and cruel but also capable of nobility. At once intimate and iconoclastic, Al Capone gives us the definitive account of a quintessentially American figure.
  • Published: 15 November 2017
  • ISBN: 9780345804518
  • Imprint: Knopf US
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 416
  • RRP: $39.99
Categories:

About the author

Deirdre Bair

Deirdre Bair was a literary journalist before taking an MA and PhD at Colombia University. Since then, she has been a university professor and has lectured and written extensively on contemporary British and French literature.

Praise for Al Capone

  • "Bair discovers a rich trove of legends.... [She] is a wise and often iconoclastic guide through Capone mythology." --The New York Times Book Review
  • "Compelling reading." --Chicago Tribune
  • "An engaging biography that debunks many, many myths about Capone and captures him as a complex person, devoted to his parents, his wife, his siblings and his son; popular at times with the masses; clever and charismatic; and, at the same time, a monster whom authorities 'held responsible for everything but the Chicago fire.'" --San Francisco Chronicle
  • "Al Capone provides tremendous insight into the man who, decades after his death, may be the best-known Chicagoan of all time." --St. Louis Post-Dispatch
  • "Deirdre Bair offers a new history of Capone, and separates fact from fiction in the process ... Bair's Capone is powerfully human." --Smithsonian

  • "Bair discovers a rich trove of legends.... [She] is a wise and often iconoclastic guide through Capone mythology." --The New York Times Book Review
  • "Compelling reading." --Chicago Tribune
  • "An engaging biography that debunks many, many myths about Capone and captures him as a complex person, devoted to his parents, his wife, his siblings and his son; popular at times with the masses; clever and charismatic; and, at the same time, a monster whom authorities 'held responsible for everything but the Chicago fire.'" --San Francisco Chronicle
  • "Al Capone provides tremendous insight into the man who, decades after his death, may be the best-known Chicagoan of all time." --St. Louis Post-Dispatch
  • "Deirdre Bair offers a new history of Capone, and separates fact from fiction in the process ... Bair's Capone is powerfully human." --Smithsonian