A horrific tale of rape and sexual abuse committed in a judge's chambers, recounted with plenty of tears and barbecue sauce by journalist/novelist O'Brien (A Dark and Bloody Ground, 1993, etc.). There's a sinisterness to small-town corruption that's even more frightening than the out-and-out bedlam of big-city violence. In his latest true-crime tale, O'Brien investigates the dystopia overseen in Dyersville, Tenn., by brothers David and James Lanier, respectively the town's only judge and district attorney. Incompetent on the bench, Judge Lanier wielded his real power from his soundproof and windowless private chambers. There he assaulted or raped at least a dozen women, then threatened them with dire consequences (loss of custody of their children being his favorite) should they tell anyone. When one humiliated staffer finally complained to the FBI, agent Bill Castleberry meticulously reconstructed the sordid goings-on. Fearing an acquittal on the rape charges—several of the victims were reluctant to testify about acts they considered unmentionable—Lanier was prosecuted under a statute that prevents criminal acts under the ``color of law.'' Initially, the novel strategy succeeded, leading to a 25- year prison sentence. But the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals threw out the conviction in 1995, ruling that the color of law statute had been misapplied. O'Brien paints heroic portraits of the women involved, who seem to spend most of their time in a state of Southern-inflected hysteria, but he neglects fully to analyze Lanier (who did not respond to requests for an interview). The judge must surely be more riveting in his peculiar pathology than the run-of-the-mill tyrant O'Brien displays here. What does emerge is a charged insight into the abuse of sex and power in the years between Anita Hill and Bob Packwood. At times melodramatic, this is nonetheless an extremely readable account of the creepy world behind one small town's picket fences.
Pub Date: March 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-06-017959-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
In the manner of their oral history of JFK's administration (Let Us Begin Anew, 1993), the Strobers present a vast miscellany of musings about Nixon and his administration by insiders, Cabinet members, and other contemporaries. Readers benumbed by the spate of books marking the 20th anniversary of Nixon's resignation will find the Strobers' undidactic approach to history refreshing. Asking, but never definitively answering, provocative questions such as ``Who ordered the Watergate break-in?'' and ``Why didn't Nixon destroy the tapes?,'' the Strobers simply allow Nixon administration principals, Watergate figures, and Nixon opponents to speak about the man and his turbulent presidency. The interviewees reflect on Nixon's election, his domestic and foreign policy achievements, the Pentagon Papers, the 1972 campaign, the second administration, and, especially, the Watergate scandal, Nixon's resignation, and his post-Watergate rehabilitation. For all their immediacy and apparent candor, however, the reminiscences do not shed new light on these subjects. For example, in a chapter asking why the Watergate break- ins were ordered, all of the interviewees, including John Ehrlichman and G. Gordon Liddy, profess ignorance or offer unsatisfying speculations, and Gerald Ford denies having considered pardoning Nixon prior to his resignation, although Ford acknowledges that the issue came up in a pre-resignation meeting with Alexander Haig. In conclusion, the interviewees speculate on Nixon in the post-Watergate era and on his legacy, with views ranging predictably from those, like former Nixon counsel Leonard Garment, who feel Nixon's policy achievements outweighed his failures, to those who, like Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, consider Nixon irrevocably tainted by Watergate: ``I think that Watergate stains his whole presidency. You can't avoid it; you can't write an obit about Willie Sutton and not talk about robbing a bank.'' Though hardly groundbreaking, this collection of interviews presents an engrossing portrait of Nixon and his troubled administrations.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-06-017027-1
Page Count: 608
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
This biography, a welcome complement to Marguerite Duras's prolific literary career, is compromised by Vircondelet's stylistic copying of his subject's oblique technique. Vircondelet's project is made clear from an epigraph quoting Duras: ``I would like to see someone write about me the way I write. Such a book would include everything at once.'' Much of Duras's work is clearly autobiographical, frequently revisiting the events of an exotic and dynamic life. In various writings she has retold the focal events of her life, most famously of growing up in Indochina, where she took a wealthy Chinese lover at the age of 15 (inspiring The Sea Wall and The Lover). During WW II, she joined the Paris Resistance with her husband (who, in the course of their activities, would be sent to Dachau). Later she joined and fell out with the Communist Party. Vircondelet is best at chronicling the first half of Duras's life and at recounting these charged events in light of her later writings. Throughout her singular career, Duras's literary work and political activities coincided with new movements without truly belonging to them—the New Wave in film (Hiroshima Mon Amour), the nouveau roman in literature, and leftist politics from radical activities in the 1950s to the turmoil of May 1968 and the women's movement. A familiar and controversial public figure in France, Duras receives full partisan support from Vircondelet, though he gives equal time to her critics. The biographer addresses Duras's complicated relationships with her mother and brothers, and her perplexing yet intimate relationship with a much younger homosexual man. However, he always follows Duras's versions of her personal life and thus adds little original interpretation of her character. Vircondelet, who has also written biographies of Huysmans and Pascal, knows Duras's work and reads it well. But he's too close to her. His epigonic biography too often reads like pretentious ghostwriting. (37 photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Dec. 2, 1994
ISBN: 1-56478-065-1
Page Count: 378
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
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