The most horrifying story about what money can buy that you will ever read.
The surreal and sordid saga of Jeffrey Epstein, from Brooklyn boyhood to Manhattan jailhouse death.
In a narrative as gripping as the documentary series Filthy Rich—and that adds previously unreported details to the well-known story—Levine, whose previous book exposed Donald Trump’s predatory nature, offers an unblinking account of how the world's most flagrant pedophile made his money—and what he did with it. "It would be a conservative estimate,” writes the author, “to say that since the 1980s, Jeffrey Epstein spent more than $35 million related to his abuse of women and girls." Levine is to be commended for so thoroughly and indelibly laying out the truth about the scores of victims as well as Epstein’s fellow perpetrators. Numerous faces from both sides are included in a riveting 16-page insert that begins with Epstein's high school yearbook photo and ends with the “unmarked stone crypt believed to be Epstein’s final resting place.” Among the many people who won’t like this damning book are Ghislaine Maxwell, Prince Andrew, Donald Trump, and Bill Clinton. While nothing can redress the lifelong damage suffered by Epstein’s victims, it is essential that their stories be told with understanding and without prurience, as Levine does here. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a long section covering Epstein's imprisonment and death adds new details but does not preclude the possibility that he was murdered. Some readers may wish for more psychological analysis: Why and how did he turn into a sociopath so obsessed with underage girls that he went through his entire adulthood without a normal romantic relationship and never came anywhere close to marrying or having a family? However, that minor shortcoming doesn’t detract from the power of the story—or the appalling revelations: “Beginning around 2001, Epstein started confiding to acquaintances that he wanted to seed the human race with his DNA by impregnating women at his vast New Mexico ranch.”
The most horrifying story about what money can buy that you will ever read.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-23718-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
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
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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