The Brothers Bulger chronicles the epic story of corruption, power and crime in Massachusetts through two of the most powerful people ever to come out of the Bay State: James "Whitey" Bulger and his younger brother, former President of U-Mass Amherst and the Massachusetts Senate, William "Billy" Bulger. The story stylizes and explains how Billy conquered Massachusetts politics and dominated its state landscape for 30 years; and how Whitey dominated local crime finally becoming one of the most wanted men in America.

The author, local radio talk-show host Howie Carr, does a very good job detailing the scale of corruption that Billy fostered and utilized, how it seemed to suck up and encompass every relevant politician to come out of the area for thirty years. But while Carr relishes in describing the evils of Billy, he spends the majority of the book describing the murderer, Whitey Bulger. How Whitey started as a male prostitute after serving a major jail term for robbery; how he took over selling cocaine and felt rapped by the Mafia in the North End.

And the book painstakingly details the roll the FBI played in making Whitey and Stevie Flemmie the two most notorious informers in crime history. From that point forward the FBI used Whitey and Flennie to take out the Mafia, and Whitey and Stevie used the FBI for protection and to rise as the most notorious gangsters in America.

The book tries to parallel the two men and chronicles their meteoric rise and then spectacular falls; whitey was finally exposed and went on the lamb; how the FBI imploded in Boston admitting that their agents had, in effect, become gangsters and partnered with Whitey, and how Billy ruined his political power base in an attempt to avoid his relationship with both whitey and the FBI.

The book has major flaws. Most notable is that as much as the two men were brothers and rose to power together, their power paths were so incongruous with the other that they seem to be almost totally disconnected. This disconnection makes caring about the singularity of the story very difficult.

Moreover, Carr is inherently toxic and negative: everyone is corrupt and crooked; dishonest and untrustworthy; criminal and deceitful. Therefore, the book lacks a positive figure or figures to empathize with. Carr seems to do the exact opposite: he does not just dislike Whitey and Billy (in fact, he seems to almost begrudgingly respect Whitey); he seems to hate everyone he describes in the books. While gangsters and crooked FBI agents and corrupt politicians seem to deserve it, Carr has nothing but bad things to say about everyone in his books (Save one or two victims of Whitey); William Weld, Michael Dukakis, John Kerry, Barney Frank, etc : Carr paints them all with a toxic and at times bitter brush.

Finally, there was a certain point where "enough was enough." There were only so many stories about Billy's corruption and graft and Whitey's murdering and crime sprees that I could take before I started to just glaze over (to say nothing of the similarities between every criminal in South Boston who all seemed to be named O'Flynn, Hallerhan, Hennessey, O'Halleran, O'Brien, O'Sullivan, etc). There was just something uninspired about the book after you got your first few tastes of murder and corruption.

If you are from Boston and want to know about this family , add one star to the review; otherwise a good book that seems it could have been a little better by being a little... less.