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The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum
- The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss
- Narrated by: Saskia Maarleveld
- Length: 11 hrs
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Publisher's summary
America’s first great organized-crime lord was a lady—a nice Jewish mother named Mrs. Mandelbaum.
“A tour de force . . . With a pickpocket’s finesse, Margalit Fox lures us into the criminal underworld of Gilded Age New York.”—Liza Mundy, author of The Sisterhood
In 1850, an impoverished twenty-five-year-old named Fredericka Mandelbaum came to New York in steerage and worked as a peddler on the streets of Lower Manhattan. By the 1870s she was a fixture of high society and an admired philanthropist. How was she able to ascend from tenement poverty to vast wealth?
In the intervening years, “Marm” Mandelbaum had become the country’s most notorious “fence”—a receiver of stolen goods—and a criminal mastermind. By the mid-1880s as much as $10 million worth of purloined luxury goods (nearly $300 million today) had passed through her Lower East Side shop. Called “the nucleus and center of the whole organization of crime,” she planned robberies of cash, gold and diamonds throughout the country.
But Mrs. Mandelbaum wasn’t just a successful crook: She was a business visionary—one of the first entrepreneurs in America to systemize the scattershot enterprise of property crime. Handpicking a cadre of the finest bank robbers, housebreakers and shoplifters, she handled logistics and organized supply chains—turning theft into a viable, scalable business.
The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum paints a vivid portrait of Gilded Age New York—a city teeming with nefarious rogues, capitalist power brokers and Tammany Hall bigwigs, all straddling the line between underworld enterprise and “legitimate” commerce. Combining deep historical research with the narrative flair for which she is celebrated, Margalit Fox tells the unforgettable true story of a once-famous heroine whose life exemplifies America’s cherished rags-to-riches narrative while simultaneously upending it entirely.
Critic reviews
“Margalit Fox has a delightful talent for breathing life into the dead to illuminate some of the world’s most fascinating people, and Fredericka Mandelbaum may be one of her most interesting subjects yet. A true-crime saga from America’s golden era of graft and grift that reads like the prequel to Oceans 11.”—Daniel Schulman, author of The Money Kings
“Who but Margalit Fox could have come up with this delicious Gilded Age tale of Marm Mandelbaum, a diamond-laden Jewish mother who ran America’s biggest crime syndicate, and her decades-long battle of wits with those trying to bring her down? Filled with the most outlandish characters imaginable, this book brilliantly explores a culture ruled by greed, graft, and inequality, with more than a few unsettling similarities to today.”—Lynne Olson, author of Empress of the Nile"
“A tour de force . . . With a pickpocket’s finesse, Margalit Fox lures us into the criminal underworld of Gilded Age New York, with excursions into the art of larceny and the finer points of safecracking. The portrait of Marm Mandelbaum is irresistible: In Fox’s lush prose, you can feel the softness of the silk and see the brilliance of the diamonds she amasses and profitably passes on. This book is pitch perfect.”—Liza Mundy, author of The Sisterhood
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Story
Mathematics shapes almost everything we do. But despite its reputation as the study of fundamental truths, the stories we have been told about it are wrong—warped like the sixteenth-century map that enlarged Europe at the expense of Africa, Asia and the Americas. In The Secret Lives of Numbers, renowned math historian Kate Kitagawa and journalist Timothy Revell make the case that the history of math is infinitely deeper, broader, and richer than the narrative we think we know.
By: Kate Kitagawa, and others
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American Bloods
- The Untamed Dynasty That Shaped a Nation
- By: John Kaag
- Narrated by: Leon Nixon
- Length: 6 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The Bloods were one of America’s first and most expansive pioneer families. They explored and laid claim to the frontiers―geographic, political, intellectual, and spiritual―that would become the very core of the United States. John Kaag’s American Bloods is the account of a remarkable American family, of its participation in the making of a nation, and of how its members embodied the elusive ideals enshrined in the Declaration of Independence.
By: John Kaag
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The Barn
- The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi
- By: Wright Thompson
- Length: 14 hrs
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
A shocking and revelatory account of the murder of Emmett Till that lays bare how forces from around the world converged on the Mississippi Delta in the long lead-up to the crime, and how the truth was erased for so long.
By: Wright Thompson
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Alexander at the End of the World
- The Forgotten Final Years of Alexander the Great
- By: Rachel Kousser
- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff
- Length: 10 hrs
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
By 330 B.C.E., Alexander the Great had reached the pinnacle of success. Or so it seemed. He had defeated the Persian ruler Darius III and seized the capital city of Persepolis. His exhausted and traumatized soldiers were ready to return home to Macedonia. Yet Alexander had other plans. He was determined to continue heading east to Afghanistan in search of his ultimate goal: to reach the end of the world.
By: Rachel Kousser
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Homeland
- The War on Terror in American Life
- By: Richard Beck
- Length: 18 hrs
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
A groundbreaking history of how the decades-long War on Terror changed virtually every aspect of American life, from the erosion of citizenship down to the cars we bought and TV we watched—by an acclaimed n+1 writer.
By: Richard Beck