Uneven but capably written. Rowe leaves readers wishing for a more satisfying solution to one puzzle while feeling relief in...
What happens when a reporter has the willpower and tenacity to try to overcome a serial killer’s refusal to communicate?
Seattle Times staff writer Rowe chronicles her dogged search to learn about convicted serial killer Kendall Francois, who killed eight female prostitutes in Poughkeepsie, New York, and stashed their bodies in the home he shared with his parents and sister. Francois, it seems, communicated with Rowe, via letters and a few face-to-face meetings, simply in an attempt to draw her into a relationship of some sort. For a while, it worked. Rowe sought a greater understanding of what separates a killer from the rest of us and, specifically, from herself. Francois’ refusal to discuss the murders he committed means the book is light on the meat of the crimes it covers, but it becomes obvious as the story progresses that at some point Rowe became as interested in investigating her own passage into adulthood as her subject’s interior life. Her childhood and difficult relationship with her mother and boyfriend become increasingly important narrative fodder, while her communications with Francois fade into the background. It is unclear whether Rowe sees herself as the spider or the fly in this strange, tense relationship, but the hunt was ineffectual in either case. The author never got her exclusive story, and Francois never achieved the deep, meaningful relationship he tried to force. Rowe’s engaging prose means the pages practically turn themselves, regardless of the disappointing end to the exchange. However, some readers may be frustrated with how to view the book: as a twisted coming-of-age memoir or the chronicle of a determined hunt for a killer’s motive.
Uneven but capably written. Rowe leaves readers wishing for a more satisfying solution to one puzzle while feeling relief in the resolution of the other.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-241612-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2016
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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