High-minded speculation and documented assumptions are the building blocks of Stewart’s convincing memoir; whether perceived...
An adopted Louisiana engineer’s search for his biological roots results in a shocking, highly controversial connection to the Zodiac Killer.
With its details legally vetted and enshrouded in pre-publication secrecy, Stewart’s head-turning memoir, skillfully co-written by veteran true-crime journalist Mustafa, explores how the search for personal truth can sometimes unearth unexpected results. Though his adoptive parents loved him unconditionally, the author still felt “discarded,” plagued by crippling feelings of insecurity and abandonment. At 39, Stewart writes of being contacted by his birth mother, Judy Gilford, a runaway who became pregnant by an older, seductive man. The author, ecstatic at their reunion, began journaling his experience, which soon included an intensive, obsessive search for his father, who he believes to be Earl Van Best Jr., a statutory rapist Stewart would soon discover had abandoned him in a Baton Rouge apartment building stairwell—and who he believes went on to become a notorious murderer. The narrative begins to build suspenseful momentum only after early sections that re-create Best’s fractured childhood and early adulthood (heavily influenced, claims Stewart, by notorious Satanist Anton LaVey). Then the author chronicles the ensuing killing spree, encrypted communications and police-taunting media spectacle that immortalized him as the Zodiac Killer. The author painstakingly pieces together over a decade’s worth of personal research and verbatim interviews with family, friends and law enforcement, then goes further to scrutinize and compare handwriting samples, police sketches and photographs, all bearing uncanny resemblances to recorded documentation from the Zodiac files. Stewart soberingly remarks that while the burden of DNA proof remains elusive, the closure he has received with his personal investigation has satisfactorily provided the “truth about my life.”
High-minded speculation and documented assumptions are the building blocks of Stewart’s convincing memoir; whether perceived as the byproduct of shrewd spadework or a fertile imagination, the author’s family history offers chilling and credible correlations.Pub Date: May 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-231316-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
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
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