The kind of man who makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up—and readers get to enjoy the creepy thrills without...
Disconcerting profile by journalist Konigsberg of his father’s Uncle Heshy, a murderous freelance gangster.
Harold Konigsberg (Heshy was his Yiddish name) was a hit man of the first tier and a loan shark of last resort, writes his grand-nephew. He’s also a queer piece of work who prompts the author’s appalled fascination. In this skillful narrative, Harold first emerges as the archetypal black sheep: an illiterate in a family of students, a malevolent creature in a house of Sabbath-keepers, a force as destabilizing as an earthquake to his relatives. He became involved in petty crimes at an early age, then graduated. Fortunately, for public safety, he proved talkative when arrested in 1963 and has been parked in jail for the past 42 years. Konigsberg knew his uncle’s reputation, yet its full import only sank in when he read the FBI files in which Harold spilled his secrets, including the nasty details of 20 hits. Making ten prison visits over a three-year period, the author tried to gain some understanding of this way-wayward family member. Harold, still a rude force, welcomed Konigsberg and talked to him about the whys and wherefores of his acts. “The curse of my business is you got to do business with a lot of scumbag cocksuckers,” declared this philosopher thug who, true to form, threatened to kill Konigsberg if he dared publish material about him. (“I’ll go right through your eye and rip your brain out of your fucking head.”) Just where does his uncle fit in current theories about psychopathy? As a forensic psychologist put it, “We may be looking at a genotype for the bad seed.”
The kind of man who makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up—and readers get to enjoy the creepy thrills without actually having to meet him face-to-face.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-009904-6
Page Count: 280
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
