Casts intriguing new light on a famous unsolved mystery. (8 pp. b&w photos, not seen)
The life and colorful times of a New York State Supreme Court justice who went missing one warm August evening in 1930.
Ever since, numerous magazine articles and many book chapters have contemplated the celebrated case of Joseph Force Crater, but this appears to be the first book entirely devoted to the classic mystery since his widow’s unsurprisingly partial account in 1961. Given the paucity of available evidence, Wall Street Journal assistant publisher Tofel has chosen to focus on the political history behind Crater’s disappearance, painting a mordant picture of the fading Tammany machine and the judge’s place in it as they “approached the vanishing point together.” In 1930, Jimmy Walker was Mayor of Broadway (and only incidentally of the rest of the city), FDR was governor of the Empire State, and the price of a seat on the bench was approximately a year’s judicial salary. This was the world from which Crater suddenly vanished, not long after making large withdrawals of cash that his wife discovered some weeks later in their New York apartment. The judge was last seen on Wednesday, August 6, after dinner with some acquaintances, headed for a musical show. His wife was at their home upstate. Without a telephone, she wasn’t immediately concerned when she did not hear from her husband. After some time, however, she concluded that he was murdered, or at least so she claimed to the insurance company. Tofel, less certain of foul play, offers a plausible alternative involving madam Polly Adler. The judge was declared dead in 1939, and the case was closed by the NYPD in 1979 after a fruitless half-century. Tofel’s surmise about what happened to Judge Crater would explain why his disappearance wasn’t investigated terribly vigorously.
Casts intriguing new light on a famous unsolved mystery. (8 pp. b&w photos, not seen)Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2004
ISBN: 1-56663-605-1
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Ivan Dee/Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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