Stroud is back in his territory of true-life heroes and villains (Lizardskin, 1992; Iron Bravo, 1995) in this crackling story of a US marshal. Agents for Marshals Service, the least well known of the law enforcement agencies, are hell-bent on proving that they can walk the walk and talk the talk. In recent years, having been given the job of tracking down dangerous fugitives, they have gotten much more attention. The marshal at the heart of this book, Luke Zitto, carries the gun he took from a homicidal fugitive he helped bring down: It's meant, Stroud suggests, to be his talisman against the bad luck that seems persistently to follow him. There is, for instance, the loss of his wife, Margot, and his stepson: While Luke was working for the Witness Protection Program, Margot took up with one of the witnesses (a white-collar criminal), and she and her son pulled a disappearing act of their own. Loss seems to prevent Zitto from becoming close to anyone. His fellow marshals call him ``the Snake'' because of his cold, solitary nature (it comes in handy, though, when otherwise tough criminals have to be interrogated). Written like a screenplay, with frequent jumpcuts, a number of first-person passages, and too many one-sentence paragraphs, the narrative sometimes trips itself up by striving to be so very tough. But the record of Zitto's pursuit of two insanely violent fugitives—the Yellow Man, who kills with a hatchet, and Paolo Rona, a brutal rapist—is relentless and gripping. The large cast of supporting characters can be confusing, but Stroud keeps the action moving, and the portrait he paints of an aging, lonely lawman, although it's a familiar one, is poignant all the same. Large doses of blood, guns, and creeps, served up with Stroud's characteristic mettle.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-553-09994-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1996
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
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
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