"Imagine a Nicholas Pileggi creation punched up by Woody Allen and you've pretty much got the idea.... Absorbing and marvelously told [in] graceful, perfectly pitched prose.... A mesmerizing expedition."
—The New York Times Book Review
(“Editors’ Choice” selection)
Praise for Blood Relation
"Irresistible. . . . [Blood Relation has] something to tell us about the relationships between men of different generations, how we look for role models wherever we find them. Scary, surreal, oddly funny, so beyond the real of normal experience it seems we’ve stepped into another world… [which] makes for an interesting double vision, and it invests Blood Relation with a vivid tension at its heart.”
— The Chicago Tribune
“The most personal and affecting account of Mob violence you’re going to get until The Sopranos returns.”
— GQ
“Fascinating. . . . Harold ‘Kayo’ Kayo Konigsberg is such an incredible character.”
— The Jerusalem Post
“A picture of the classic gangster, an excellent study not only of crime but of family and Jewish identity.”
— Library Journal
“A moving story of coming to terms with one’s roots.”
— Booklist
“Sparkling”
— The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Engaging”
— The San Diego Union Tribune
“Priceless”
— The New York Times Book Review
“A portrait of evil that is never banal, Blood Relation reads like Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt in reverse. Konigsberg's book should not be put down; Konigsberg's uncle should.”
— Edward Conlon, author of Blue Blood
“Blood Relation marks the arrival of a terrific new writer, with a keen eye and a true voice.”
— Philip Gourevitch, author of We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families
“A deeply weird, terrific story and a piercing meditation on justice over several American generations. Eric Konigsberg has stumbled across a vein of pure narrative gold buried in his family and he spins this raw material (some of it very raw) into literature. Blood Relation is scrupulously reported, wonderfully told, with wiseguys as vivid as any in Elmore Leonard and a main character so disturbing and original that nobody who reads it will ever forget him.”
— William Finnegan, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Barbarian Days
“What a deal! To be a writer and learn that your great-uncle was a notorious hit-man. How would you negotiate between shame and perverse pride, between candor and reticence? Here is a family story straining at the seams with material, written so well, with such care and emotional precision.”
— Geoffrey Wolff, author of The Duke of Deception and The Final Club
“An elegant act of investigation, accountability, and redemptive analysis. By so fearlessly documenting the circle of violence and its aftermath, Konigsberg has produced a volume of family history like nothing else I have read. Terrifying, moral, and funny, Blood Relation affirms our faith in the power of the best nonfiction to move and delight us.”
— Walter Kirn, author of Up In The Air and Thumbsucker
“A riveting and unforgettable journey into the mind of the blackest sheep in an aspiration-rich American family. Konigsberg’s inspired reporting cracks a window on the bedlam of post-war organized crime: gaudy, amoral, outlandish, inept, indiscriminately tragic. And while the story he tells has the delight and suspense of fiction, his deeper obsessions are with questions of truth, and the double edge of American striving. Tracing the aftermath of Uncle Harold’s violence among the forgotten families of showgirls and shop stewards, and exploring the relationship between success and self-delusion in his own, he has written a vivid, haunting, funny, magnificently original portrait of a family that survived on the unsaid. I love this book. It got under my skin and stayed there.”
— Katherine Boo, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Behind The Beautiful Forevers
Interviews
“The Journalist and the Murderer”
— Tablet Magazine
“The Hit Man Who Came to Dinner”
— Jewish Journal