The cocaine-and-cash-fueled high life of South Florida in the 1980's serves as glittering backdrop for this ambitious, if uneven, true-crime debut from Miami attorney Cope. Zipping from their Coconut Grove mansion to their 650-acre Colorado ranch in a jet-set whirl of sailing, skiing, and vigorous late-night partying, multimillionaire Stanley Cohen and his exotically beautiful, much younger fourth wife, Joyce, seemed to have ``the perfect life''—until Miami police found Cohen in bed with three bullet holes in his head. Detectives immediately tabbed the grieving Joyce as their prime suspect but, in the absence of conclusive proof, few expected her eventual conviction. Following the story from the crime to the final, unsuccessful appeal of Joyce's life sentence, Cope—who had access to most of the principals as well as to investigators and attorneys on both sides- -does a good job of detailing the painstaking process of constructing a case from almost purely circumstantial evidence- -gunpowder traces on a discarded tissue; troubling time discrepancies; odd long-distance phone calls; conflicting autopsy reports. But although her scenario persuades, Cope fails to deliver the knockout punch necessary to move the narrative from a sad and violent tale to a truly compelling saga of good vs. evil. Her obvious, never fully realized, attempt to portray the Cohen marriage and its bloody conclusion as emblematic of the excesses of the time leaves the story cluttered with confusing red herrings (e.g., the unrelated story that begins the text, of a young Miamian's extravagant vacation). Similarly disappointing are the flat characterizations and an odd structure that saves the author's most revealing material (and best writing)—an account of Joyce's troubled childhood—for last. Solid criminology, weak sociology, and just compelling enough to satisfy hungry true-crime fans. (Sixteen pages of b&w photographs—not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 15, 1993
ISBN: 0-671-73026-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1993
Those who missed them in Playboy, The New Republic, and other media can catch up with culture diva Paglia's latest performances here. The special effects are as spectacular as ever; the act, however, is getting old. As in her previous collection, Sex, Art, and American Culture (not reviewed), Paglia fills this volume with every magazine piece of hers from the last few years, transcripts of her TV appearances, an annotated bibliography of media references to her, and even a section of cartoons in which she was featured. Paglia's production is like a three-ring circus. There's competent journalistic cultural criticism on one side, encompassing appreciations of figures like Sandra Bernhard and Amy Fisher, and reviews of books by Madonna and Edward Said. Paglia's well-publicized polemic against feminist and gay movement dogma, which continues here, hasn't gained any subtlety. Her loose use of the opprobrium ``Stalinist'' will strike those misguided readers who take her essays on ``culture war'' topics seriously as genuinely offensive. In another ring, there's batty scholarship. A long essay written especially for this volume offers a ``pagan theory of sexuality'' for the contemporary world. Those seeking rigor will be warned off by the fact that Paglia's title for this piece is taken from dialogue in the movie Ben Hur. The really compelling action comes in the center ring, where the carnival of Paglia's construction of her own persona never stops. Her straightforwardly autobiographical writing is brilliant. One moving memoir celebrates the formative influence on her of four gifted and rebellious gay male friends; another hilariously revisits the promise and the pomposity of the Susan Sontag whom the young Camille Paglia idolized. Inspired by Sontag, Paglia exclaims that ``we need more women stars who can run their own studios!'' Paglia herself has become a star, and as such she inevitably fascinates. But she often seems miscast as an intellectual leader, mirroring as she does another aspect of her image of Sontag: ``no argument, only collage.''
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-75120-3
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1994
Humorist and chronicler Frazier (Coyote v. Acme, 1996, etc.) returns to Indian country for an astute, personal, and disarmingly frank assessment of life and conflict among the Oglala Sioux on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation. Reintroducing a figure from Great Plains (1989)—Le War Lance, with whom the author has been friends for 20 years—Frazier explores his own affinity for the Sioux by relating the curious twists and turns of their friendship. A raconteur of the first rank as well as an alcoholic, Le has roamed from Hollywood to upper Manhattan, but is finally back home on the rez. Since Frazier’s own wanderlust has brought him and his family to Missoula, Montana, he often goes to visit Le. Over time, Le introduces his brother and sisters, uncle and aunt, even the graves of his parents and other brothers, endlessly spinning wild yarns that Frazier reproduces without judgment. Elements of tragedy (the girlfriend of Le’s brother is killed by a drunk driver) mingle with near-misses (a hose breaks at the distributor, enveloping the family in a cloud of propane gas), but all this is the normal state of affairs at Pine Ridge. As Frazier ponders the history of Indian bars locally and nationwide, or considers the treaty violation that allowed the US government to steal the Black Hills from the Sioux, he also finds resilience in the great-granddaughter of medicine man Black Elk, and hope in the remarkable story of SuAnne Big Crow, a teenage basketball hero who reunited her bitterly divided people by her example, and whose spirit still lives even after her death in a car crash in 1992. Frazier’s remarkably thorough and thoroughly eclectic study of one people in one place at a particular moment in time reveals as much about its author as its subject, and as much about “us” as “them.” (Photos, maps, not seen)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-374-22638-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1999
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