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
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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