Word: payback
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...beauty of Central Park, "sandhogs" toil in darkness and cold, hammering through rock and laying the foundation for famous skyscrapers and sewer lines. Seven hundred feet below the lights of Time Square, the darker side of the New York City underworld surfaces in Thomas Kelly's first novel, Payback, a look into the opulent 80s construction business that thrived on Reaganomics and mob violence. Kelly, who worked for ten years as a sandhog before graduating from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, brings his own underground expertise to a sordid story of hard men, hard neighborhoods, hard-to-break families...
More than just a macho mobster novel, Payback centers around two brothers, Paddy and Billy Adare. Paddy is an ex-boxer who just missed Olympic glory and at 32, has spent his life working for Jack Tierney as a mob enforcer. Billy is the first in the family to have left life as a laborer behind to embrace education, a college degree and a sub-urban, green-lawn dream of prosperity...
Meanwhile, the Internal Revenue Service was seeking $1.5 million in back taxes and penalties from Jon and Robin. (The amount would eventually drop to $36,787, atheist lawyers have said.) And there was the payback for Madalyn's tendency to litigate. In September 1987, she sued for control of a California atheist organization called Truth Seeker. (The bid failed.) Truth Seeker's furious owner countersued American Atheists under a federal racketeering law. The dispute eventually ate up more than $500,000 in legal fees; at one point Madalyn was so sure of losing that she told an employee...
This case sticks in the craw [SOCIETY, Dec. 2]. It isn't because of O.J. Simpson's race. A jury of munchkins decided it was payback time for past injustices. The case won't go away because too many African Americans have turned Simpson into an icon. I'm afraid that race relations have been set back. Affirmative-action programs have been set back. The healing will begin when Simpson wipes the smirk off his face and goes away. PAUL WASSERMAN Northridge, California...
Harvard wanted another shot at Brown, and it even disposed of No. 18 Princeton (13-8) in the semifinal round of the Ivy Tournament in order to get that prime payback opportunity...