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The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss
Maybe someday
30
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
8/100Critics
53/100Scholars
Author:
Margalit Fox
Publisher:
Random House
Date:
July 2, 2024
In 1850, Fredericka Mandelbaum emigrated to New York from Germany and worked as a rag peddler on the streets of the Lower East Side. By the 1870s she was a widow with four children, a popular society hostess, and a philanthropist. What enabled a woman on the margins of nineteenth-century American life to ascend from tenement poverty to immense wealth?
What The Reviewers Say
Fox... excels at telling a story that is rich in historical detail.
Fox... a seasoned journalist and author, [writes] in a breezy, fast-paced style.
Ms. Fox has produced a vivid portrait of Mandelbaum in this rich recounting of her life and times. Best-known as an obituary writer for the New York Times, Ms. Fox knows how to synthesize facts and shape a story.
There’s not much for a biographer to work with, so Fox gives us Mrs. Mandelbaum’s world instead — which is very entertaining. The problem comes at the end, when Fox asks the big question: how did Mrs. Mandelbaum go from struggling immigrant in the 1850s to New York City crime boss twenty years later?.
