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THE BAREFOOT BANDIT

THE TRUE TALE OF COLTON HARRIS-MOORE, NEW AMERICAN OUTLAW

A remarkable crime saga that could have been 100 pages shorter.

Highly detailed account of a teenaged criminal who eluded law enforcement for two years.

Travel journalist Friel became fascinated with Colton Harris-Moore when he and his wife relocated to the seemingly peaceful residential island of Orcas in the waters off Washington State. Harris-Moore, born in 1991, grew up on Orcas and knew its terrain intimately. By age 10 he was stealing from local businesses and homes. Caught occasionally, he served time in juvenile detention before starting a new crime spree focused on stealing and flying private airplanes, even though he had never completed pilot training. When Harris-Moore could not successfully steal an airplane, he stole pleasure boats and automobiles. As his brazen thefts spread to other islands and then to the mainland, law-enforcement agencies felt certain they could capture Harris-Moore. They were wrong. He often escaped on foot, outrunning police despite his insistence on going through life without wearing shoes (hence his moniker "the barefoot bandit"). Those bare feet and his height caused Harris-Moore to stand out, but he seemingly did not worry about disguising himself. The bulk of the narrative provides sometimes-overwhelming amounts of information about Harris-Moore's crimes and his escapes. Friel also examines his subject’s haphazard home life, his loving but often inept mother, his unpopularity in school and his apparent desire to go through his young life as a loner. The author eventually became involved in the search to locate Harris-Moore, adding a mostly effective first-person element to the saga. 

A remarkable crime saga that could have been 100 pages shorter.

Pub Date: April 1, 2012

ISBN: 978-1-4013-2416-2

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Hyperion

Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2012

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

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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