Here is Amazon.com's description:Born in the squalid Irish slums of Brooklyn, in the first year of the twentieth century, Willie Sutton came of age at a time when banks were out of control. If they weren't taking brazen risks, causing millions to lose their jobs and homes, they were shamelessly seeking bailouts. Trapped in a cycle of bank panics, depressions and soaring unemployment, Sutton saw only one way out, only one way to win the girl of his dreams.
So began the career of America's most successful bank robber. Over three decades Sutton became so good at breaking into banks, and such a master at breaking out of prisons, police called him one of the most dangerous men in New York, and the FBI put him on its first-ever Most Wanted List.
But the public rooted for Sutton. He never fired a shot, after all, and his victims were merely those bloodsucking banks. When he was finally caught for good in 1952, crowds surrounded the jail and chanted his name.
Blending vast research with vivid imagination, Pulitzer Prize-winner J.R. Moehringer brings Willie Sutton blazing back to life. In Moehringer's retelling, it was more than need or rage at society that drove Sutton. It was one unforgettable woman. In all Sutton's crimes and confinements, his first love (and first accomplice) was never far from his thoughts. And when Sutton finally walked free--a surprise pardon on Christmas Eve, 1969--he immediately set out to find her.
Poignant, comic, fast-paced and fact-studded, Sutton tells a story of economic pain that feels eerily modern, while unfolding a story of doomed love, which is forever timeless.
And some editorial reviews from Amazon.com:
Amazon Best Books of the Month, September 2012:
When Willie Sutton walked from Attica Prison on Christmas, 1969, the
Irish, Brooklyn-born bank robber reemerged as a folk hero for American
everymen fed up with a financial system that favored the rich. Infamous
for his flair for disguise, Willie the Actor and his crew shook down 100
banks between the 1920s and his final arrest in 1952. He claimed to
have never killed anyone, but he spent over half his adult life in
prison, where he saved his sanity by reading classics and meticulously
plotting audacious escapes--some successful. In Sutton, J.R. Moehringer (The Tender Bar)
performs a similarly audacious feat, tunneling through layers of legend
and emerging with a novel that hums with the truth of Sutton's life,
with all its dramatic contradictions. Shifting easily between Willie's
first Christmas of freedom and the pivotal events of his past,
Moehringer's tale of how lost love and desperation compelled Sutton to
feats of (admittedly criminal) brilliance rivals those in The Shawshank Redemption. --Mari Malcolm
'A terrific first novel by turns suspenseful, funny, romantic, and sad-in short, a book you won't be able to put down' John Burnham Schwartz, author of Reservation Road 'Astonishing detail ... an unerring sense of place and history ... a fascinating portrait of a criminal' People magazine 'With a voice at once sentimental and muscular, Moehringer is like John Irving or Roddy Doyle ... at its core the novel is a love letter to New York' Entertainment Weekly 'What Hilary Mantel did for Thomas Cromwell, J.R. Moehringer now does for Willie Sutton' Newsday --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
