Though with an unexpected payoff, this is a tale in need of streamlining.
Memoir of a life under the shadow of identity theft.
Betz-Hamilton (Consumer Sciences/South Dakota State Univ.) grew up in the age before the internet, a time when it took considerable effort to assume another person’s identity and exercise financial fraud under those auspices. For a time, her mother was given to buying cheap, “pointless” jewelry from TV shopping channels, hiding the fact from her father, but she was seemingly normal compared to others in the family. Since the identity thief seemed to follow them wherever they traveled, moving often to stay a step ahead of creditors, taking pains to hide their whereabouts, it became evident that someone within the family was the author of the plot. Was it the grandmother who “had long ago stopped taking her insulin”? Grandma’s boyfriend, who made a career of sitting on the porch? Some other relative? The payoff, a financial version of the movie Halloween, is surprising indeed, and it opens onto a world of mental illness on the part of adults and a life of bewildered, anxious isolation on the part of a child who bore no blame in the matter. As the author writes, “recalling the phoneless house of my teenage years, I began to realize how especially damning it had been to lose that connection to the outside world.” Betz-Hamilton has since become a specialist on identity theft, and her notes on such matters as how debt is traded back and forth between credit card companies and collection agencies are revealing. Still, though the book is fairly short, it seems padded, and the writing is too often clunky: “There have been a few moments in my life when reality has skipped in front of me like a broken television”; “Grief waited like horses locked in a starting gate.” Given that identity theft and fraud are both commonplace and comparatively easy to fix these days, readers might find the memoir dated as well.
Though with an unexpected payoff, this is a tale in need of streamlining.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5387-3028-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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