by Anthony Francis DiBello ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A
An autobiography that feels like a teaser to garner interest in a film adaptation, but it never delivers the full picture.
DiBello’s debut memoir assures readers that his life is the stuff that movies are made of.
The preface invites readers to “Tailgate along as you enjoy the fact-filled amazing true-life story of this incredible man.” The author writes about learning how to gamble as a kid, his Army years, making a fortune, talking with future ABC Sports president Roone Arledge about the creation of Monday Night Football long before it happened, spending time with Johnny Cash, and how Frank Sinatra once accidentally took a swing at him. Overall, the author appears to have lived an incredible life, and he writes in an engaging, conversational voice. The trouble is that this book only gives readers an outline of that life and never truly immerses them in the individual stories. In one tale, for example, the author tells of John, a chameleonlike sidekick of his other friend, Bob, and how John “posed as something or other” to help them get a deal in purchasing rights to “old soap opera radio stories.” John was to “do ‘his thing’ to seal the deal”; the author then says, “He did, we did, Bob plunked down a tidy sum.” This is offered as an example of the kinds of adventures that the author and Bob would get into, but it’s never specific enough to allow readers to truly envision the scene. The same goes for a section titled “Hero or Villain? Judge,” in which DiBello writes about serving in a “special” Army company designated for “screw-up[s] of any kind.” In the author’s description, the company was fraught with bullies trying to shake down weaker men for money. He cites a “melee” that broke out when some soldiers were rolling dice in an area where people were supposed to be giving haircuts, as the “haircut concession” and the “gambling concession” fought for the space. There are no details about who was involved or the results of that fight, however—just acknowledgment that it happened. Shortly afterward, the author says that he eventually helped bring the company and its captain down, and he asks readers to judge whether he was right to do so, but the stories are so vague that it will be hard for readers to make such a judgment. In a footnote, DiBello offers money to anyone who can provide more details about the company—with possibly more rewards if this book is ever made into a movie.
An autobiography that feels like a teaser to garner interest in a film adaptation, but it never delivers the full picture.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Sept. 4, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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