A wild, entertaining ride that could have been a little shorter.
Former drug smuggler, TV writer, and magazine contributor Stratton (Altered States of America: Outlaws and Icons, Hitmakers and Hitmen, 2006, etc.) revels in his glory days in the drug trade and his eventual downfall at the hands of a determined government agent.
The author—a former publisher of High Times and consultant for HBO’s prison series Oz—is determined to showcase the romantic side of drug smuggling, admit that there is still an ugliness to it, and come out the hero of his own man-against-the-world narrative, all with a dose of humor and keeping the ultimate cool. He isn’t entirely successful, but the attempt results in a compulsively interesting story with the requisite drama and suspense that will keep the pages turning. From the beginning, Stratton frames the story as the ongoing battle between himself and Drug Enforcement Administration agent Bernard Wolfshein, who comes across as calm, confident, and a little obsessed with Stratton. In turn, the author portrays himself as cleverer, admittedly less confident, and at least equally obsessed with Wolfshein. Much of the humor is wrapped up in this cat-and-mouse chase, where Wolfshein always seems one step ahead and still doesn’t get his man. In the scenes featuring both men, Stratton’s background in TV writing is apparent; Wolfshein’s dialogue always sounds a bit like an episode of Law and Order. Stratton and his crew pulled off a surprising number of impressive smuggles while Wolfshein tried to pin them down, and Stratton throws in a lot of extra color by way of lavish spending, sex, and glittering parties that make heads spin. Near misses abound and offer great fun for readers, even though it’s obvious from the start that Stratton won’t stay free for long. Eventually, heavy hints and one too many existential rants become tiresome.
A wild, entertaining ride that could have been a little shorter.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62872-668-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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