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Next Meeting: Monday, May 12, 2025 Plainfield Park District Recreation Administration Center 23729 W. Ottawa St. Plainfield, IL 60544 |
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May's Title: Broadway Butterfly: The Lady Gangster of Jazz Age New York by Anthony DeStefano This book was chosen in honor of Plainfield Area Public Library's centennial celebration! Indiana-born Vivian Gordon fluttered to New York in 1920 looking for fame and fortune. Before long, the flame-haired chorus girl parlayed her youth, beauty, and ambition into more profitable means as a tough and glamorous symbol of Prohibition-era excess. She was a speakeasy owner, blackmailer, high-end escort, extortionist, racketeer, and con woman. But given her dangerously intimate associations, Vivian was also a woman who knew too much and who rightfully feared for her life. On February 26, 1931, Vivian's bludgeoned and garroted body was found dumped in Van Cortland Park in the Bronx. Now, in the first in-depth biography of its kind, Pulitzer Prize and Emmy Award-winning journalist Anthony M. DeStefano unravels her tumultuous life and the headline-making murder that became an obsession for many. The evidence Vivian left behind was damning: a diary with more than three-hundred names implicating powerful officials, philanthropists, businessmen, and every major gangland figure in collusion and corruption. The investigation eventually resulted in the career-ending of James "Jimmy" Walker, disgraced mayor of New York City. Broadway Butterfly finally finds a place in history for Vivian, a woman with a rare legacy in gangster lore, whose demise was as tragically inevitable as the brutality of the city's demimonde during Prohibition. |
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Shadowed Loyalty
by Roseanna M. White
Sabina Mancari never questioned her life as the daughter of Chicago's leading mob boss until bullets tear apart her world and the man she thought she loved turns out to be an undercover Prohibition agent. Ambushes, bribes, murder, prostitution -- all her life, her father sheltered her from his crimes, but now she can no longer turn away from the truth. Maybe Lorenzo, the fianceĢ who paid barely paid her any attention in the last two years, has the right idea by planning to escape their world. But can she truly turn her back on her family? All his life, Lorenzo's family assumed he would become a priest, but he has different ideas -- marrying Sabina and pursuing a career in the law. Despite his morals, he knows at the core he isn't so unlike his mafiosi father and brothers. Has he, in trying to protect Sabina, forced her into the arms of the Prohibition agent bent on tearing her family apart? How can they rebuild what has so long been neglected and do it in the shadow of the dark empire of the Mafia
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Questions? Suggestions for future book club picks? Email us at jbanko@papl.info or lkoeller@papl.info |
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Plainfield Area Public Library
15025 S. Illinois St.
Plainfield, Illinois 60544
815.436.6639papl.info |
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