A high-action, low-analysis memoir of a commendable life.
Adventures of a peripatetic human-rights activist committed to exposing the horrors of modern-day slavery and freeing its victims.
Cohen—whose past includes an addiction to street drugs and a business/creative partnership with Jane’s Addiction leader Perry Farrell—transformed himself into a dedicated activist in the early 1990s after his mother was diagnosed with cancer. He began studying Hebrew and working on Jubilee, a peace-through-music movement seeking to lower the debt of third-world countries and to free coerced workers. Journalist Buckley profiled Cohen in an award-winning 2007 article that appeared in LA Weekly. Here she aids him in recounting his escapades in Cambodia, Sudan, Ecuador, Myanmar, Israel and Iraq, among other countries. Cohen’s job, which he refers to as “night frighting,” was to pose as a sex-hungry tourist. He would visit a brothel, select a young girl from a lineup, go with her to her room, gain her confidence, tape an interview and take photos to document the visit. Using the information he gained, agencies made arrests, rescued the girls and placed them in protective custody. Cohen took great personal risks, sometimes getting caught in the crossfire of rival gangs, sometimes being forced to hide and flee the country. The graphic details of his nighttime activities contrast sharply with the quiet hotel scenes, where Cohen said prayers for his father and meditated on passages from the Book of Job. During part of his time abroad, the author was also responsible for the care of his terminally ill father back in California, a task that caused him deep distress and the details of which are disturbing. While Cohen tosses in some statistics and reports on the actions being taken by others, this is not an overview of sex trafficking or any other form of forced labor; it is a personal story of one man’s campaign to rescue its victims. An epilogue urges readers to get involved and provides links to various human-rights groups.
A high-action, low-analysis memoir of a commendable life.Pub Date: June 23, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4169-6117-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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