![YOU COULD DO SOMETHING AMAZING WITH YOUR LIFE [YOU ARE RAOUL MOAT]](https://d1fd687oe6a92y.cloudfront.net/img/user-media/titles/title/cover/dd816b7bcbc04a80973193afaa213617/9781925106558.jpg.300x0_q85_autocrop.webp)
True crime from a radically different perspective.
A British journalist probes the troubled psyche of a notorious killer.
In his first book, Hankinson takes great formal risks in presenting a story that might sustain suspense for American readers but is well-known in Britain from saturation newspaper coverage and previous books. The subject is the last week or so in the life of Raoul Moat, a period in which he was released from prison and proceeded to gun down the new boyfriend of his former girlfriend as well as wounding her and a police officer. Moat then proceeded to hide out with two friends whom he termed hostages but who were subsequently convicted as accomplices. The tick-tock narrative is written in both the present tense and the second person, meaning that Moat is the “you” addressed by the author. Thus, readers get inside the head of the murderer, thinking his thoughts and explaining his motivations. The approach may well cultivate even more empathy than a more common first-person narrative, but readers will hardly feel comfortable in Moat’s skin. Obsession leads to plenty of repetition, as he rants about how this is as much his former girlfriend’s fault: for betraying him and shunning him and mocking him and ultimately for costing another man his life by lying about him. Paranoia runs rampant throughout, as police are out to get him when he has done nothing wrong, psychiatry fails him (though he often fails to keep appointments), and social workers are “witches.” The context provided by Hankinson, particularly following Moat’s death, goes a long way toward showing how much of this tragedy could have been prevented, how the police failed the victims and social services failed the troubled killer, and how a disturbed mother and a troubled childhood had left Moat marked. Ultimately, though, putting both the narrative and readers inside the head of the subject is a gamble that meets with mixed success.
True crime from a radically different perspective.Pub Date: March 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-925106-55-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Scribe
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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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