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
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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