The first book to explain why the world was primed for the Luigi Mangione moment, showing the history that led him to be embraced as an avenger with an affection not seen since Jesse James or Robin Hood.
Part investigation, part cultural X-ray ... The book’s opening chapters are its best ... The book’s power sometimes rests too heavily on the very surfaces it describes. Richardson builds much of his narrative from publicly available material...and less from firsthand interviews with people in Mangione’s orbit ... Absent this type of personal detail, the result feels meticulously curated but emotionally distant ... What’s missing is a deeper accounting of why Luigi’s act resonates now — in an America where algorithmic denials of health care collide with the algorithmic spread of resentment and despair ... Richardson writes beautifully. His reporting on the media aftermath, the dueling op-eds, the partisan spin, the influencer reels, is precise and often bleakly funny. But for all its elegance, Luigi offers relatively little fresh fieldwork.
By book’s end, the reader has no clear understanding of Mangione’s personality or what might have motivated his alleged crimes. Worse still, Richardson’s obvious sympathy for him gives the reader the uncomfortable impression of having been privy to a veiled endorsement of an assassination.
Rather than telling the story of its subject, it is book is about eco-terrorism. It traces Mangione’s ideas not to radicals like Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti – 1920s anarchists also accused of murder – as others have done, but to the Unabomber’s acts of eco-terrorism while living off the grid in rural Montana ... It’s frustrating that Luigi: The Making and the Meaning is so disorganised, a Matryoshka doll that keeps opening only to reveal the Unabomber, not Mangione, at the centre ... Condescension towards Mangione runs throughout the book. Richardson is certainly not interested in letting his subject off the hook. But a good biographer should, perhaps, be a little enamoured with their subject.
