8th Confession

How is it that we can recognize photos from our high school yearbook decades later, but cannot remember what we ate for breakfast yesterday? And why are we inclined to buy more cans of soup if the sign says “LIMIT 12 PER CUSTOMER” rather than “LIMIT 4 PER CUSTOMER?” In Kluge, Gary Marcus argues convincingly that our minds are not as elegantly designed as we may believe. The imperfections result from a haphazard evolutionary process that often proceeds by piling new systems on top of old ones—and those systems don’t always work well together. The end product is a “kluge,” a clumsy, cobbled-together contraption. Taking us on a tour of the essential areas of human experience—memory, belief, decision making, language, and happiness—Marcus unveils a fundamentally new way of looking at the evolution of the human mind and simultaneously sheds light on some of the most mysterious aspects of human nature.

This book traces the Mafia’s beginnings from an underground patriotic society which sprang up six hundred years ago in Sisily, through the group of Italian immigrants – the Black Hand – Who savagely tore control of New York’s waterfronts away from Irish racketeers, to the Mob which went on to run organized crime throughout Italy and America. Drawing on previously unavailable information and nearly two decades of research, William Balsamo – great-nephew of the first godfather – and George Carpozi Jr. trace the Black Hand’s coalescence into an organization whose insidious influence reached across the Atlantic and into a presidential administration. And they go behind the headlines to reveal with chilling clarity the true extent of the Mafia’s influence today.

He always travelled to work under an assumed name, though typically it was one he never changed. In later years, when he retired and it became public knowledge, there came a time when schoolchildren would  dance around concrete playgrounds singing of his fabled false identity and the case which made him, as one newspaper tactlessly put it, ‘hang up his hat’.