Honor Thy Father
Gay Talese
 The book begins when Joseph "Joe Bananas" Bonanno is kidnapped from the streets of New York in 1964 and the Bonanno crime family is thrown into disarray for two years in a power struggle called the Banana War, culminating in an armed-ambush in Brooklyn in which Joe's son Bill Bonanno is nearly killed. Though punctuated by life-threatening encounters, Talese also recounts how much of a mafioso's life is as tedious as any person's: days filled with television, overeating, time spent with family. Prominent mafiosi, like Vito Genovese, Lucky Luciano, Joseph Profaci, feature in Talese's account, but the story is focused on Bill Bonanno's thoughts about his life as mafioso. Talese notes the similarities of Bonanno's life to many ordinary Americans &mdash; homogenized from his ancestors culture, an alumnus of the University of Arizona where he belonged to ROTC. But as son of Joe Bonanno, he was an heir to his father's empire, a source of great stress for him. The book's title was suggested by Bill's wife Rosalie as acid commentary on the deleterious effect of Joe Bonanno on her husband's life. A review in The New York Times wrote that Talese "conveys the impression that being a mobster is much the same as being a sportsman, film star or any other kind of public 'personality.'" Talese concludes with the controversial thesis that the Italian mafia was little different than gangs that came with previous waves of immigration, such as Irish gangs in the century before, or black and Latino-gangs that Talese saw as following. Talese attributed the rise of the gangs as a consequence of a majority that oppresses a minority group.