Free Book Contest - Book Give-Away: A...

It's time for another book give-away!

A Pickpocket's Tale - The Underworld of Nineteenth-Century New York.

From Amazon.com:

Appo grew up on the streets, selling papers and learning to pick pockets. New York in the nineteenth century was just the place for a pickpocket to make a living. There were plenty of crowds, and people crowded into streetcars where jostling was taken for granted. Appo was tough, but his toughness extended to his being able to take punishment from other criminals or from legal authorities, not in physically harming his victims. He worked in the realm of crooks who thought themselves "good fellows": they worked carefully, with dexterity and guile rather than muscle; they spent lavishly on themselves and their cronies, and they never squealed, even when wronged.

There was truly some honor among these thieves. Appo generally made a good living, but with thousands of pickpocketing attempts, he was going to be caught some of the time. Much of Gilfoyle's history tells about his many and varied incarcerations, within the reform school ship _Mercury_, the Egyptian-style Tombs prison in New York City, and Sing Sing, the prototype for making industrial laborers of convicts, who suffered from filthy conditions, overcrowding, and torture from stupid and untrained guards. Appo rightly charged that it drove prisoners to insanity, death, and suicide. He graduated from pickpocketing to bunco schemes, but eventually testified to a government committee not against his fellow "bunco steerers", but about the schemes in general and especially the complicity of the police that allowed it to continue unhindered.

His testimony before the committee was his turn to go straight. Appo also had served as an opium den guide to Dr. Henry Kane who did the first medical investigation of the effects of opium addiction. In 1895 he went on the stage, playing himself in the melodrama _In the Tenderloin_, a play that portrayed criminals as something more complicated than simple bad guys. By the time of his release from his last imprisonment, his "underworld universe no longer existed". Those who had organized on a national scale the green-goods game had all been rounded up, and the customary support from venal policemen was giving way to the first of the police reform movements. Appo underwent a religious conversion (though one has to wonder whether this was merely the only career move he could make as an older criminal whose world had moved on without him), but evangelical reformers gave him only half-hearted support, and seemed to believe that he like all criminals was beyond real reform. For a while he worked at $6 a month as an undercover agent for the Society for the Prevention of Crime.

He died of old age in 1930, at age 71, not a hero, not an urban Jesse James, "neither a latter-day Robin Hood nor a Jack the Ripper", just an ordinary guy compelled to specific crimes because of specific social conditions. It's a great life story, and Gilfoyle has used his skills as a historian and storyteller upon its episodes to give fascinating histories and essays about penal institutions, social philosophy, and criminal styles of the time.

To win this book it is going to be a kill the thread contest. Whomever is the last comment, in a 12 hour period, wins this book~

This means that is someone comments now, and no one else comments in 12 hours -they would be the winner. If someone comments an hour from now, their comment must be the last comment in this thread, for 12 hours.

Now I am going on vacation tomorrow, if the contest ends before I return, I will mail the book after I get back. Shipping to the winner will be free~