The Last Fish Tale: The Fate of the Atlantic and Survival in Gloucester, America's Oldest Fishing Port and Most Original Town Book

I purchased this one on a Kindle daily deal and I think I got burned. My enthusiasm when I started was pretty high and then just a few pages in it began to fall, and continued falling until the very end when I just kind of flipped through the epilogue.

My disappointment sprang from a misunderstanding: I thought this was a work of non-fiction. I was expecting to read some fairly dry but interesting text about the Westies, maybe some good direct quotes brought up during proceedings, etc. Instead I got fictionalized passages, all emotioned-up, stuffed with slang, and filtered through the author's idea of what these people were truly like and who were the true good guys.

A quote:

"As his tour of duty wore on, Featherstone's sense of guilt and displacement deepened. He drank almost every day. Sometimes, he would get so fucked up he would have blackouts and hardly remember what had happened the night before."

Another:

"Not only were the Italians going to be looking into this Ruby Stein thing, but now there were going to be "bulls", or police, all over the neighborhood."

Another:

"With three razzle-dazzle courtroom victories in a row, Hochheiser and Aronson became folk heroes in criminal circles on the West Side of Manhattan - and the scourge of the NYPD."

add to those ugly little messes a few others like a vivid description from the point of view of a guy who was getting shot. It noted where he was hit first and how bad it hurt (again, from his point of view) ... and then revealed that this guy died a few minutes later. Right. Got it. I understand the author's desire to add drama to what could otherwise be dry, but this seemed excessive.

It was also obvious that the author had written down various notes that he felt needed to be attached to certain minor characters and then never checked them off the "I've used this already" list, leaving readers subjected multiple times to passages like:

""Mad Dog" Sullivan, rumored to have been the one who killed Jimmy Hoffa,"

Let me check my notes and make sure that's a different "Mad Dog" Sullivan than the one you told me is rumored to have killed Jimmy Hoffa.

One last quote which I point out specifically:

"[...] it was largely a sympathetic piece presenting Mickey as a victim of war."

When I read that line I had to check to see if the author was talking about his own book or some other published work.

I trudged through to the finish, hoping the description of the trial would somehow miraculously pull this book out of its downward spiral, but no. The whole thing held my interest about as much as some crappy History Channel docu-drama at 3 in the morning, basically not worth the effort required to make it stop, might as well just let it roll until we reach the credits.

p.s. Apparently I don't have a category on my Kindle for "fictionalized version of non-fiction events" so it just went into "read" and hopefully will never creep out again.