Author of the week

Russell Shorto

Russell Shorto never wanted to write a book about family, said Dave Davies in NPR.org. But that was before the author of several narrative histories was buttonholed by a second cousin who mentioned “the story” and asked when he was finally going to write it. “I said, ‘What story?’” Shorto recalls. “And he said, ‘Your grandfather; the mob.’” Shorto had vaguely known already that in his own hometown of Johnstown, Pa., his longdeceased grandfather had once been the No. 2 figure in the local crime syndicate, behind a brother-in-law. The pair primarily ran a gambling operation, one that brought in about $2 million a year. But it wasn’t the scale of their misdeeds that drew Shorto in so much as it was the dynamics of the culture. “My grandfather acted like a medieval king or something,” he says. “He did what he wanted.”

Now that he’s written Smalltime, Shorto has become a big believer in research into family history, said Dave Sutor in the Johnstown Tribune-Democrat. “It gives you this kind of 3D version of yourself,” he says. He now appreciates, he says, why his namesake, a first-generation Sicilian-American, turned to bootlegging in the 1920s and then to that lucrative gambling racket run out of a cigar shop near City Hall. He also knows how much emotional damage the original Russell Shorto caused by fathering two children out of wedlock and in one case choosing to take the child from the mother to be raised by others. Finally, he came to understand his own father better, recognizing the true sources of frictions going back generations. “It’s kind of like doing therapy,” he says. “It’s a wonderful experience, but it’s hard.”