A solid study of an outlaw and his image.
One year in the life of legendary criminal John Dillinger.
With this new biography of the Depression-era bank robber, Gorn (History/Brown Univ.; Mother Jones: The Most Dangerous Woman in America, 2001, etc.) demonstrates that the American popular imagination never seems to tire of Dillinger and his legend. Since his death at the hands of federal agents on July 22, 1934, that legend has only grown. He has been the subject of popular fiction and nonfiction for years, as well as numerous films, including the upcoming Public Enemies, starring Johnny Depp as Dillinger. Gorn specifically addresses the phenomenon of Dillinger’s glamorous image and searches for an explanation of American society’s enduring fascination with outlaws. The author focuses on a one-year period in 1933 and ’34, when Dillinger and his gang robbed more than a dozen banks across the country. In the process, more than a dozen policemen, civilians, and gang members were killed, and reporters followed the gang’s exploits every step of the way. Though they were captured in January 1934, Dillinger managed to escape jail by—legend has it—carving a fake gun out of wood and brandishing it at the guards. Whether the wooden-gun story is true is still a point of contention—and Gorn doesn’t seek to solve the mystery—but newspapers reported it as real and began to write about Dillinger as a “calm, humorously cynical bandit” and “a carefree devil with many likable traits.” During the Depression, when thousands of people lost their homes to bank foreclosures, Dillinger became a Robin Hood–style hero to many—he took from the rich, even if he didn’t give to the poor. “The violence notwithstanding,” writes Gorn, “there was something deeply appealing about [him], his nerves, his coolness, his élan.” The author also makes a strong case that Dillinger’s favorable publicity galvanized federal agents’ efforts to bring him down.
A solid study of an outlaw and his image.Pub Date: June 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-19-530483-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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