Rating: 
Summary: A boy's urban adventure
Review: Set in 1935, "Billy Bathgate" tells the story of how its title character, a 15-year-old street kid from the Bronx, apprentices himself to one of the most formidable gangsters in New York. Thomas E. Dewey, the special public prosecutor of New York who later was to run for president against Roosevelt and Truman, is making a name for himself by going after mob figures, and Dutch Schultz is one of his prime targets. Dutch's gang is involved in the operation of breweries, nightclubs, and labor unions, and they're not shy about disposing of their enemies through symbolically gruesome means, as we see what happens to two scab window washers. To evade taxes they launder their money through a small town upstate called Onondaga. Billy becomes attracted to the flamboyant gang and slowly ingratiates his way inside by doing small jobs for them. Besides the charismatic but tragic Dutch, other members include the friendly Otto Berman, who loves playing with numbers and becomes Billy's fatherly mentor, the brutish muscle Lulu, the silently perceptive Irving, and Mickey the driver. Billy narrates in the first person with a unique voice, using run-on sentences that display his enthusiasm to be playing with the big boys. The novel begins "in medias res" with a scene of one of Dutch's disloyal henchmen being fitted for a pair of cement shoes. The man's girlfriend, a voluptuous high-society blonde with a complicated private life, becomes Dutch's moll, and Dutch gives Billy the assignment to keep her company when the gang hides out in Onondaga for the summer. Eventually Billy realizes that her life might be in danger as a possible witness to her ex-boyfriend's murder, and one of the best parts of the novel is his clever plan to get her out of harm's way. In the novel's tense climax, Dutch plots to assassinate Dewey, an event which, if carried out, would certainly change the course of history as we know it. As in "Ragtime," Doctorow is eminently able to evoke a romantic but realistic New York City of a time long past that perhaps was quieter but not necessarily more innocent sexually or morally. Doctorow obviously enjoys using the city and figures from history as a canvas on which to create his fiction, and his joy is infectious to the reader. I certainly wish I could have spent a teenage summer having Billy's experiences. Invoking the excitement of a boyhood adventure in an entirely original milieu, written with maturity and panache, "Billy Bathgate" is a novel Mark Twain would have saluted.
Rating: 
Summary: Gansterism at it Rise and Fall.....
Review: The novel Billy Bathgate is a discovery of the undercover life of gansters in the 1930's. The 15 year old boy whom is Billy Bathgate grows up in the family mafia of Dutch Shultz. In the end Shultz is killed by Luciano and Billy takes over. An Outstanding reality of the brutal murders and the reality of mobsterism.
Rating: 
Summary: Unlike Billy, the novel fails to mature
Review: Young Billy is green and fresh at the book's opening, and a seasoned young man by its end. Early in the book, you eagerly learn with Billy, through his neophyte eyes. But the book and Billy get bogged down in upstate New York, in a slow and sulky movement through time. I yearned for either a faster pace, or to learn more about Billy's inner workings, and felt that Doctorow didn't quite give me enough of either, as the book wore on. I say farewell to Doctorow for now, having liked Ragtime the best of his I've read.
Rating:
Summary: Unlike Billy, the novel fails to mature
Review: Young Billy is green and fresh at the book's opening, and a seasoned young man by its end. Early in the book, you eagerly learn with Billy, through his neophyte eyes. But the book and Billy get bogged down in upstate New York, in a slow and sulky movement through time. I yearned for either a faster pace, or to learn more about Billy's inner workings, and felt that Doctorow didn't quite give me enough of either, as the book wore on. I say farewell to Doctorow for now, having liked Ragtime the best of his I've read.
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