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March 18, 2024

The Bishop and the Butterfly explains why you know the term ‘Tammany Hall’

the true crime that's worth your time

book cover and historical images

Folks well-versed in New York history likely know all about Tammany Hall, the 1800s-era political organization that essentially ran the city (and boy oh boy, do those history buffs want to tell you all about it). But for the rest of us, the term is just a synonym for political corruption and old boy malfeasance, as generic as "Kleenex" or "mafia" or "Jet Ski." I never had the intellectual curiosity (or was just too stubborn) to take those history buffs up on their explanation offer, but after reading Michael Wolraich's February release, The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age, I understand why the topic holds such fascination.

Much of that is a credit to Wolraich, whose 2010 book, Blowing Smoke: Why the Right Keeps Serving Up Whack-Job Fantasies about the Plot to Euthanize Grandma, Outlaw Christmas, and Turn Junior into a Raging Homosexual, was an alarmingly prescient look at the now-common (deep) state of conspiracy-theory America. He's not a standard-issue true crime author, which works to his benefit when it comes to breaking down how this private social/political group ended up controlling one of the country's most important regions for decades. Sometimes it takes a writer who understands false conspiracy theories to explain a real and actual conspiracy in a digestible fashion.

...Read the rest of Eve's review of The Bishop and the Butterfly at Reality Blurred.

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