An astonishing tale of aborted justice.
Heart-rending, longtime-coming defense of his record by a Chicago detective who paid dearly for blowing the whistle on JFK’s Secret Service.
A native of St. Louis, the author became a Pinkerton detective and then a Chicago Secret Service agent. In 1961 President Kennedy handpicked Bolden for his personal detail in Washington. A self-described “racial pioneer” at each step of his professional career, he was immensely proud to serve as the first black agent on the presidential detail, and grateful for JFK’s sincere commitment to racial equality. However, Bolden soon collided with the “ol’ boys network.” He endured crude racist caricatures drawn in his service manual, separate accommodations in a “Negro Motel,” casual slurs by other agents and a shockingly blatant outburst by his superior: “You will always be nothing but a nigger. So act like one!” In early November 1963, responding to uneasy intuition and visions that had plagued him since childhood, Bolden told superiors that drinking was rampant within the ranks and that if a crisis occurred, the service could not act swiftly or appropriately to secure the president’s safety. He was in Chicago at the time of the assassination, and after that found the Secret Service wary of his outspokenness. Framed for his role in busting a Chicago counterfeiting bond gang, he was forced to take a lie-detector test and arrested by the feds in May 1964. His first trial ended in a hung jury thanks to a lone black juror; in the second, an all-white jury found him guilty. Bolden was imprisoned for more than five years, mostly in the psychiatric ward of the Springfield Medical Center for Federal Prisoners. In September 1969, after a short stint at a prison camp in Alabama, Bolden was granted parole. Many documents in the case have vanished, but the author tirelessly reconstructs the record in his compelling, if somewhat tedious and repetitious look at an attempt to silence an honorable man.
An astonishing tale of aborted justice.Pub Date: March 4, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-307-38201-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2007
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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