Download Chicago: A Novel Of Prohibition Created By David Mamet Readable In Mobi

όχι, όχι . δεν μου άρεσε ,'s

I get he was going for Glengary Glen Ross meet Goodfellas but this felt so forced and fell so flat.
The dialogue was choppy and the analogies mostly cheesy, In short a huge disappointment, Mike Hodgeveteran of the Great War, big shot of the Chicago Tribune medium fryprobably shouldn't have fallen in love with Annie Walsh, But then maybe the guys who killed Annie Walsh shouldn't have messed with Mike Hodge, . . In Chicago, David Mamet has created a bracing, kaleidoscopic pageturner that roars through the Windy City's underground on its way to a thunderclap of a conclusion.


Here is not only his first novel in more than two decades, but the book he has been building up to for his whole career.
Mixing some of his most brilliant fictional creations with actual figures of the era among them Al Capone, suffused with trademark "Mamet Speak," richness of voice, pace and brio, and exploringas no writer canquestions of honor, deceit, revenge and devotion, Chicago is that rarest of literary creations: a book that combines spectacular elegance of craft with a kinetic wallop as fierce as the February wind gusting off Lake Michigan.
"Va detto che un cuore spezzato ti tiene il peso sotto controllo, E ti rende pallido e interessante per l'altro sesso, " This book was disappointing. Don't be fooled by the title and synopsis Chicago, has little to do with gangsters in the windy city during the prohibition era, rather, author David Mamet focuses his slow moving and oftentimes sleepinducing plot on a former WWI pilot, now journalist, Mike, who pines for an attractive florist only to loose her in a hail of bullets.


Dialogue heavy, the audiobook was hard to follow at times there are a number of bit players who pop up and then disappear, adding nothing but confusion and contributing to the boredom.


My /. The pieces were there but the puzzle just didn't come together, I liked the sudden impact of the murder of Annie Walsh, Mikes' love interest and the thin connections to organised crime but didn't enjoy the journalistic focus and tedious pace.
The kind of writing youd expect from the author of “Glengarry Glen Ross”, with plenty of playlike dialog, where timing and the way words sound together are very important, and you run across occasional monologues.
And as youd expect from a book called “Chicago” from an author known for Chicago ties, you get plenty of tastes of the city.
And while this is a period story from right after WWI, Mamet drops plenty of wellknown names, including an extended bit on Bessie Coleman, many well known street names, and more.
My personal favorite mention was of Chicago neighborhood Hegewisch, where my wife grew up, as the swampy spot to dispose of murdered corpses.
That and the Fox River duck hunting story that starts the book were excellent, These Chicago references on reflection seem a bit gratuitous, not really key to the story and chosen for that flicker of recognition they provided.
The story was OK for a mystery, although it went on some tangents that I couldnt always keep straight, The treasure of the book was not so much the story as the occasional sentence or paragraph or scene that just stood out.
This is a meandering tale about reporters, murders, and the mob, It wants to be a thriller but moves too slowly to generate suspense, The story is told primarily through dialogue between the main character, Mike, and his friend Parlow with little to no exposition,

If you don't mind your historical fiction with a heavy dose of what I can only call Literary Elements then perhaps Chicago is for you.
As it is, I finished the story frustrated and wishing I'd just read a Raymond Chandler novel instead, Στα χρόνια του κορονοιου , διάβασμα για τα χρόνια της ποτοαπαγόρευσης και πραγματικά αναρωτιέμαι τι είναι πιο ζορικο. Στο Σικάγο των πολλών εθνικοτήτων, στα απονερα του Μεγάλου Πολέμου κ στις παρυφές του οικονομικού κραχ , οι ομοιότητες είναι τραγικά πολλές.
Δεν μπορείς να επιβληθείς, να έχεις δεδομένα αλλά η ζωή συνεχίζεται κ το σωστό διάβασμα της σε πάει παρακάτω

Το ύφος είναι στα πρότυπα των μεγάλων του είδους και ο ρυθμος αργός, σχεδόν θεατρικός Weirdly anachronistic dialogue combined with deceptive marketing

Mamet can usually be counted on for memorable toughguy dialogue laced with a liberal use of profanity and the breaking of all rules of grammar "There is nothing that I will not do" Spartan "Put.
That coffee. Down. Coffee's for closers only. " Glengarry Glen Ross "Don't you want to hear my last words" "I just did, " Heist etc. . The dialogue in this latest novel not his usual genre, so one wonders whether an abandoned screenplay or theatre work was recycled uses an odd outofperiod Elizabethan or Victorian English in the mouths of the supposed's Prohibition era Chicago characters.
At one point after a character jumps into a grave à la sitelinkHamlet I though the plot might continue with Shakespearean allusions but that didn't come to pass.


Although the Thompson machine gun depicted on the cover does make a late cameo appearance in the plot, the story has actually very little to do with the gangsters and the Chicago bootlegging wars between the O'Banion and Capone gangs that one would expect in a book promoted as "A Novel of Prohibition.
" Instead we mostly have two newspapermen fumbling their way through an investigation of a series of homicides that turn out to have nothing to do with the illegal alcohol trade.


ThereIsAlwaysOne
I listened to the Audible audiobook and was startled to hear about a character's "late demise by lead" with "lead" pronounced to rhyme with "heed" instead of "led.
" My review for this book was published in the Feb,,, edition

of Library Journal:

In his first novel in more than two decades, legendary playwright Mamet Glengarry Glen Ross picks up where his Oscarnominated screenplay for The Untouchables left off, with a panoramic portrait of the Chicago underworld during Prohibition.
Mike Hodge, veteran of the Great War, is ayearold newspaperman at the Tribune, working with his partner Parlow to find out who murdered mobbedup restaurateur Jackie Weiss and courting the sweet Irish lass at the local floral shop, Annie Walsh.
But when his beloved is killed in a postcoital ambush, Mike has more reason than professional curiosity to uncover the truth, The story is fastpaced and violent but often difficult to latch onto because of Mamet's infamously dense and jagged dialogue, which is on ample display throughout.
Like the late novelist George V, Higgins, Mamet prefers to let his characters tell the story with a minimum of omniscient narration, trusting the reader to work out the plot through the lies and banter.
VERDICT A hardedged, though elusive return to form from the Pulitzer Prize winner,

CopyrightLibrary Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc, Reprinted with permission. This was not what I was expecting, There was a tremendous amount of dialogue but no action, More about newspapers than gangsters, at least in the part of the book that I managed to read, I also got no feel of the period from this book, Abandoned. As the whole world knows, when Hollywood was filming Glengarry Glen Ross, there was a concern that the stage play wasnt long enough to be a decent screenplay.
So David Mamet added a scene to the screenplay, the famous scene where Alec Baldwin stomps into the story for a few minutes and berates the salesmen who arent Al Pacino.
“Coffee is for closers,” he shouts, “Always be closing. ” And, this being a Mamet project, a few words that I cant include on a family book review website,

This is “snappy dialogue,” you understand, and Glengarry Glen Ross and Mamets other films are chockful of it, In the Millers Crossing screenplay, Joel and Ethan Coen note that the snappy dialogue tends to dry up “once a guy starts soiling his union suit,” but thats never been a problem in Mamets universe.
And CHICAGO, God bless it, is a veritable fountain of snappy dialogue, flowing from his pen as from a dark and corrupted stream.


The reader may come to this novel expecting a story, and said reader will not be overly disappointed, The protagonist, Mike Hodge, is a scrappy Chicago Tribune reporter in the age of Al Capone, a veteran of World War I air battles, and hangs out in disreputable bars and reputable whorehouses.
Its a mans life in a mans world, and Hodge makes his lonely way through it until he is surprised by love and then devastated by its loss.


That is the story, such as it is, a sad tale of loss and revenge, and it hardly matters, CHICAGO is not a typical historical mystery it is more about human motivations than solving a crime, And it doesnt rely a great deal on crimesolving technique Hodge spends most of his investigation bumbling around, following up on leads, waiting for people to explain what is really going on.
And none of it matters,

Despite its evocative cover of a gangster with a Thompson gun, CHICAGO is highgrade literary fiction, more about characters and worldviews than crime and corruption.
More pearls of wisdom flash by than bullets, And if the wisdom is hardedged, bitter and cynical, perhaps all the better,

The real question that the book has to address from a marketing perspective is whether or not it will be able to win readership from outside of Mamets fan base.
I have followed his career ever since a college professor recommended House of Games, which is a fantastic character study wrapped around a deeply twisty and satisfying story.
But if youre not in the market for rapidfire profane dialogue, will you be won over

It is something of a close question, but the answer is “probably not.
” The difficulty in dealing with CHICAGO as a reading experience is not so much with Hodge, but with the people he talks to.
There is another reporter who is more or less his mirror image, an AfricanAmerican madam in a comfortable brothel, and a collection of crooked cops and honest gangsters.
There isnt a character in the book outside of Hodge who couldnt be filled by Central Casting without a moments consideration, And I kept hearing Hodges voice in the same Irish lilt that Gabriel Byrne used in the aforementioned Millers Crossing, if that gives you an idea.
And the characters generally play true to type there isnt one moment when any of them surprise you, or themselves,

But neither the story nor the characters are the real point, The real point is Mamet himself, his skill, his ability to wring evocative prose out of the overworked, sterile soil of the hardboiled crime novel.
His understanding of the way people speak to each other, when to deliver the smart retort or the impassioned diatribe, This is a novel of bigshouldered conversations, the rough and tumble of speech, what people say and do not say, and how it all works together.


Hodges fellow reporter remarks at one point that he has stopped reading a certain author because of stark, staring envy at the writers prowess.
This book evokes those same feelings for anyone who tries to write dialogue making it a teethgrinding experience for some, But for the rest of us, who revel in snappy dialogue, CHICAGO is an unalloyed joy,

ed by Curtis Edmonds Given that I picked this novel up in the thrift store for a mere dollar, and then saw that most people here on Goodreads were giving it only a star or two, perhaps my expectations were lowered, but I rather enjoyed this postmodern noirish gangster novel from David Mamet.
Although I've seen Mamet texts performed in the theater and on the silver screen, this was the first I'd read on the page.
The style is all his, and the dialogue here is excellent, ifalso perhaps because of the's settinga tad reminiscent of early Hemingway.
But then that's why I dubbed the novel postmodern: seems like it's a fairly original story, but one cobbled together, anachronistically, a century after the historical moment described, out of Hemingway's style, a bit of Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts and other sassy and cynical books and films about newspapermen, and what we've seen lately in Peakey Blinders and Boardwalk Empire, that is to say, the sociohistorical reading of's gangsterism as a combination of returning WWI vets with PTSD and an addiction to violence coupled with the opportunity to crime, fast money, and social mobility provided by the Volstead Act.


It was a pretty quick and enjoyable read, if not in the brilliantly original or overthetop masterpiece category, I see the word "meandering" popping up in reviews here, insinuating that the novel is incompetently structured, but I found the plot throughline pretty slick, and I also enjoyed the narrative detours into human nature, gun lore, police corruption what noir doesn't scream not only to defund the police but to never have funded this institutionalized form of crime in the first place, race relations, whore house operations, etc.
etc.

My only criticism, really, is that a couple of chapters seemed a bit out of place, giving me a twinge that they were added later or shuffled around at some point, which took me out of the narrative flow and got me thinking about the workings of the novel qua novel.
Seems like it was chapter three or four struck me as an opening chapterthus I thought that the ones that had come before had been added as an afterthought.
These tracks could have been covered better, other than that, I enjoyed the heck out of it, It's at least a million times better than that pseudoexistential noir crap turned out by Paul Auster back in the daythat stuff really stank.
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