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
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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