A tale that beggars belief, told in a most amiable, if long-winded, way.
An easygoing international drug smuggler tells his life story.
Marks spent most of his life looking for a good scam and a good time. As a child, he got out of a school by faking illness; as a student at Oxford, he used his considerable intelligence to cheat on tests and soon became a fixture of the nascent mid-’60s drug scene. Graduation found him “temporarily straight,” but that state soon ended when a dealer friend was jailed and Marks stepped into the breach to sell hashish in London. He moved on to ferrying drugs and currency across European borders for others, and soon enough was arranging his own import/export deals with characters such as “Lebanese Sam,” his man in Beirut, and maverick Irishman Jim McCann, who fixed things at the Shannon airport. Marks traveled the world (Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Thailand for business; Spain and Italy for pleasure) with tons of marijuana and hashish and millions of dollars following in his wake—stuffed behind auto paneling, hidden in yachts, sealed in smell-proof containers for air travel. Meanwhile, Marks collected multiple identities, passports, and bank accounts, as well as a handful of legitimate business operations, although, he reports, “I enjoyed being a smuggler most of all.” In his personal life, Marks kept things simple: after a failed starter marriage, he soon settled down with his second wife and had three children. Following the progression of Marks’s business rapidly becomes overwhelming, but his story, published in England in 1996, is book-ended by a single point: prison. Hunted by the DEA, Marks was finally busted in Spain in the late ’80s and served a number of years in the pen before being shipped back to England.
A tale that beggars belief, told in a most amiable, if long-winded, way.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-7493-9569-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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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