Engaging reading about an elegant modern-day Robin Hood.
An ex–jewel thief’s account of her more than 50-year career stealing fabulously expensive gems from some of the world’s most exclusive stores.
Born to an African American coal miner father and his Native American wife in the West Virginia community of Slab Fork, Payne grew up with a keen awareness of social injustice. She knew from childhood that “greedy coal mining companies made a ton of money” on poor families by skimping on housing and mine safety. Though her family lived decently, she and her mother sometimes became victims of her father’s violence. Determined to stay independent of men and help her mother get away from her father, Payne employed a talent for theft that she accidentally discovered while trying on watches at a jewelry store. She began her criminal career in her early teens stealing food from the market and money from school for her family. As her confidence grew, so did her desire to live in the luxury denied people of color. By her late teens, Payne used her beauty and charm to entice store jewelry store clerks into showing her the expensive jewelry she took with ease. Later, she became involved with a married Jewish businessman who introduced her to the black market underworld and helped her score major thefts all over the country. After his death, Payne set her sights on international heists at stores like Cartier and Bulgari. She served one light jail sentence late in her career for a minor theft, yet neither the FBI nor international police were ever able to definitively prove her guilt. Payne’s personal charm is clearly evident on every page, but what makes her book especially provocative is her righteous anger at a (largely white) diamond trade built on the backs of poor Africans and her belief that she was “notorious on purpose.”
Engaging reading about an elegant modern-day Robin Hood.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-291799-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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
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