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RICHARD STRAUSS: DER ROSENKAVALIER (Deutsche Grammophon). Herbert von Karajan leads a sterling silver cast in Strauss's nostalgic Viennese nosegay...
...book's setting is Chicago in the 1930s, an era of celebrity gangsters, ruined financiers, penniless immigrants, left-leaning intellectuals and psychotic anarchists, all of them interconnected in Von Hoffman's ruefully comic invention. The period is as rich and varied as the turn-of-the-century New York City of E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime, and the range of real-life characters is even greater: Hoodlums Al Capone and Frank Nitti and Machine Gun Jack McGurn, Mayors Big Bill Thompson and Anton Cermak, Roman Catholic Cardinal George Mundelein, Utilities Tycoon Samuel Insull and Assassin Giuseppe Zangara...
...back of the yards," catastrophically encourages Allan to learn more about the style and ferocity of the syndicate. Organized Crimes is part political satire, part informal history, part rumination on the Depression, part love story between the rich boy poor in spirit and the poor girl rich in perception. Von Hoffman's elemental themes are deftly woven into the episodic narrative: among men of power, there may be differences of method but not of motive; between brains and privilege, choose brains, because money and position may prove fleeting, while intelligence endures...
...Von Hoffman, a former columnist for the now defunct Chicago Daily News and for the Washington Post, writes with occasional Second City vulgarity and feistiness. But he can also display an elegiac grace about a world in which everything, everywhere, has suddenly gone wrong: "Heading along the street to where he had parked his car, he looked up and saw a dark red, liver-colored sky, full of ores and oxides and particulates. The droughts of last summer had been followed by the winds of November. Although Allan did not know it, he was seeing the State of Oklahoma blowing...
...Von Hoffman's large cast and its machinations remain credible and, even in the comic passages, are never overdrawn. But the author is more than an adroit tale spinner; it is character, not accident or circumstance, that brings his central figures to grief. In the process, he merges Chicago myth, legend and history with poignant private truth. This journalist, at least, had not only a novel but a genuine novelist...