PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewThe man made for good copy and, based on Michael Shnayerson’s fast-paced and absorbing biography in the Jewish Lives series, he still does. written in a rat-a-tat style where money jingles and the American dream is in reach ... Shnayerson...makes good use of the gossipy published memoirs of the many people, from paramours to attorneys, who consorted with Siegel, as well as of heavily redacted F.B.I. files, their pages smudged with black ink. With a keen eye for the amusing, and humanizing, detail, he enlivens the traditional rise-and-fall narrative ... Readers awaiting a new plot twist, a late-in-the-day revelation or, for that matter, a debunking of underworld mythology, will not find it in these pages, which hew tightly to conventional wisdom. But they will come away with an enhanced understanding of, and even sympathy for, the man who, according to at least one of his associates, was the \'supreme gangster in the U.S., the top man … the big boss.\'
Ben Katchor
RaveThe Jewish Review of Books... Katchor has once again done right by the creative tension between word and image in his absorbing, sly, and occasionally maddening new book on the history of the dairy restaurant, a former fixture of the American Jewish urban landscape ... As much a visual experience as a textual one, The Dairy Restaurant is not a traditional narrative, not by a long shot. Drawn with the artist’s distinctive hand and affinity for gray wash, images of exterior signs and interior seating arrangements, of people, cows, and plates of food inhabit nearly every page, vividly recounting the story of the dairy restaurant’s evolution over time and space ... Contemporary readers of The Dairy Restaurant may no longer be familiar with baskets of onion rolls set atop a stainless-steel counter, or, for that matter, with protose steak, but, in their current hungering for the kind of community this humble eatery once provided, they’re apt to recognize themselves.
