Masterful research, although some material appears to function as a story-stretcher.
A popular true-crime writer offers his fifth in a chilling series on serial killers.
Schechter has written about familiar murderers like Ed Gein (Deviant, 1998) and H.H. Holmes (Depraved, 1996), but this time he focuses on a deformed 14-year-old killer whose rampage shocked 19th-century Boston. Jesse Harding Pomeroy was arrested in 1874 for the brutal murder of a four-year-old boy and was quickly nicknamed “The Boston Boy Fiend.” His sadistic career had begun three years earlier with the sexual torture of several younger boys. Five of his victims identified him from his oversized head and his milky right eye: he ended up sentenced to six years in reform school (where he thrilled to the punitive beatings of other boys). A born psychopath, he played the system and got out early. His next act was to kill a young girl who came into his mother’s store, followed by the child who ended his string of crimes. Schechter introduces the story with an informative overview of various periods in history—including the 1990s—where child killers raised a social alarm. He also notes that Pomeroy made a Lecteresque cameo in Caleb Carr’s novel The Alienist. More compelling is Schechter’s reconstruction of the sensation-hungry times: he offers newspaper clips, accounts of other crimes, clashing diagnoses from forensic alienists, and bizarre social theories such as the concern that lurid dime novels created such monsters. Pomeroy, who wrote a self-serving autobiography, received a controversial death sentence that was later commuted to life in solitary. His persistent attempts to escape surprised everyone and kept him in the Boston papers for the next 50 years.
Masterful research, although some material appears to function as a story-stretcher.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-671-01448-X
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2000
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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