In 1965, Gay Talese left his job as a reporter at The New York Times to focus on magazine writing, such as 1966's "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold" and longer projects, like his 1969 book The Kingdom and the Power.

[2] Though punctuated by life-threatening encounters, Talese also recounts how much of a mafioso's life is as tedious as any person's: days filled with television, overeating, time spent with family.

Prominent mafiosi, like Vito Genovese, Lucky Luciano, Joseph Profaci, feature in Talese's account, but the story is focused on Bill Bonanno's thoughts about his life as a mafioso.

Talese notes the similarities of Bill's life to many ordinary Americans — homogenized from his ancestors' culture, an alumnus of the University of Arizona where he belonged to ROTC.

The book's title was suggested by Bill's wife Rosalie as acid commentary on the deleterious effect of Joe Bonanno on her husband's life.

[3] The intensely introspective account that Talese extracted from Bill Bonanno prompted Time magazine to label him "the golden retriever of personalized journalism".

It is a book about fathers and sons, about trust and betrayal, about the old style and the new; it is, of course, a tragedy, because the genre of the family saga, real or imagined, always seems to turn out that way.