Now nearly old enough to receive Social Security and in a mellow mood, a once-notorious cat burglar reveals how he filched from the rich and famous.
Mason was no Robin Hood; he kept what he stole. With evident aid from veteran thriller writer Gruenfeld (The Street, 2001, etc.), he details the mechanics of his most exciting jewelry heists. His m.o. included prospecting the society pages for those who had it and flaunted it, carefully casing their homes, and planning for every contingency he could think of. He never confronted a victim, never carried a weapon, and delayed fencing the loot. He worked alone, though the papers usually reported his daring robberies as the work of gangs. In his day, the one-man gang lifted serious bling-bling from notables like Mrs. Armand Hammer, Robert Goulet, and a Mafioso. He nabbed Johnny Weismuller’s Olympic medal and sent it back. He hit Phyllis Diller twice. Though he mingled with the upper crust, clearly the savvy gonif consorted more with criminal toughs than society toffs. Supplementing his recreations of the thrill of the heist, Mason also offers abundant info on the feckless underworld life, sharp looks at lawyers and the criminal-justice system from arrest through prison to parole, and a couple of tips on thwarting break-ins. While burglary was his avocation, this thief had a decent day job. Even as he was nabbed and shipped to jail, he remained a regular family man. Eventually, his wife divorced him. A happy liaison with an heiress followed. As Mason reports, the police despised him, but his families loved him. That’s his story and he’s sticking to it, but the charm of it all evaporates a bit over time, as the narrative begins to sound like a repentant confession from atop a bar stool.
Engaging, extravagant account of life on the wrong side of the law that leaves readers to decide how much to like the rogue—and how much to believe him. (Photo insert, not seen)Pub Date: April 20, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-50839-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2004
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | TRUE CRIME
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The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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