A fascinating, page-turning story of a genuine scoundrel.
The life of a ruthless mobster, based on personal interviews.
When Boris Nayfeld was born in 1947 in Gomel, Belarus, his father was thousands of miles away “doing time in a Soviet gulag for black marketeering.” His mother abandoned him and his brother three years later, leaving them in the care of their grandmother. “I never loved [my mother],” he said later in life. “To be honest, I’m only grateful for one thing: she didn’t have an abortion.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, it wasn’t long before he was hanging out with gang members, on his way to his own first experience with Soviet prisons. Century, the author of Hunting El Chapo and other bestselling true-crime books, thrillingly chronicles Nayfeld’s criminal career in the Soviet Union, where stealing from the state was a main source of illicit income. However, living visibly beyond one’s nominal means was a good way to earn unwelcome attention, and in 1979, Nayfeld and his family took part in a general exodus of Jews to the U.S. It wasn’t long before he found himself in Brighton Beach, where “bilking the system was widely admired, a demonstration of intelligence and adaptability.” Nayfeld quickly allied himself with those who could ease his path, especially Evsei Agron, a pickpocket from Leningrad who’d become a kingpin in Brooklyn. Under Agron’s mentorship, Nayfeld took part in a stunning variety of scams, from passing counterfeit Russian coins to recent immigrants to insurance fraud, eventually hitting a real jackpot with fuel-tax evasion. Century wisely lets his subject tell most of the story in his own vivid words, painting his career in crime as a regular job, with prison just a cost of doing business and violence one useful item in the toolbox. True-crime fans will find this one irresistible, and the lengthy glossary of terms is a welcome addition.
A fascinating, page-turning story of a genuine scoundrel.Pub Date: July 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-063-01495-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.
The iconic model tells the story of her eventful life.
According to the acknowledgments, this memoir started as "a fifty-page poem and then grew into hundreds of pages of…more poetry." Readers will be glad that Anderson eventually turned to writing prose, since the well-told anecdotes and memorable character sketches are what make it a page-turner. The poetry (more accurately described as italicized notes-to-self with line breaks) remains strewn liberally through the pages, often summarizing the takeaway or the emotional impact of the events described: "I was / and still am / an exceptionally / easy target. / And, / I'm proud of that." This way of expressing herself is part of who she is, formed partly by her passion for Anaïs Nin and other writers; she is a serious maven of literature and the arts. The narrative gets off to a good start with Anderson’s nostalgic memories of her childhood in coastal Vancouver, raised by very young, very wild, and not very competent parents. Here and throughout the book, the author displays a remarkable lack of anger. She has faced abuse and mistreatment of many kinds over the decades, but she touches on the most appalling passages lightly—though not so lightly you don't feel the torment of the media attention on the events leading up to her divorce from Tommy Lee. Her trip to the pages of Playboy, which involved an escape from a violent fiance and sneaking across the border, is one of many jaw-dropping stories. In one interesting passage, Julian Assange's mother counsels Anderson to desexualize her image in order to be taken more seriously as an activist. She decided that “it was too late to turn back now”—that sexy is an inalienable part of who she is. Throughout her account of this kooky, messed-up, enviable, and often thrilling life, her humility (her sons "are true miracles, considering the gene pool") never fails her.
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023
ISBN: 9780063226562
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
SEEN & HEARD
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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