Plausible yet incomplete account of biker criminality, delivered with more grime than romanticism.
Brash account of a reformed bad boy’s decision to help the federal government take down “Green Nation,” the Vagos outlaw motorcycle gang.
Rowe, currently enrolled in the Witness Protection Program, makes no bones about his sinful past as a street-fighting drug dealer and convicted felon: “On [methamphetamine] my ego was out of control....I became a feared man about town.” Yet it was just this reputation that allowed him to infiltrate the Vagos, after concluding that the gang had become a violent plague upon his hometown, the hardscrabble Southern California city of Hemet. “Through fear and intimidation, the Hemet chapter demanded respect...making life miserable for everyone in town,” he writes. Rowe linked up with an ATF agent involved in the “One Percenter Task Force,” devoted to targeting OMGs. Although his local Vagos had previously tried to recruit him, Rowe still endured a humiliating period of hazing and servitude as a “prospect.” Even after he became a “full patch” member of the gang, ATF’s investigation ground on for nearly three years, allowing Rowe to record himself buying guns and drugs from fellow gang members. Still, the author felt an obvious affinity for the bikers, or at least those who avoided brutalizing civilians: “the Vagos offered a family where the misfit toys could find common ground and belong to something greater than themselves.” Rowe writes clearly, with a lighter touch and a more grounded specificity than in many reformed-gangster memoirs. However, he focuses more on the personal strain created by his undercover life, and his long-term romance with a volatile heroin addict, than on developing a full, specific narrative of the Vagos’ misdeeds. Thus, the story becomes less compelling, even as the task force’s operation reaches its climax, resulting in 40 arrests and several convictions for murder and other offenses.
Plausible yet incomplete account of biker criminality, delivered with more grime than romanticism.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6734-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2013
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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