Will appeal to readers of true crime and law enforcement narratives.
Acidic account of the little-understood profession of bail bondsman.
“You don’t want to need to call me—but I’m a good guy to have on your side if you do,” writes Judelson, who is unapologetic about the strange inverse morality of being determined to provide for his clients’ well-being despite, in many cases, their involvement in serious crime: “I don’t give a shit if you’re innocent. That’s not my problem.” Furthermore, each bond Judelson writes represents major financial risk; as depicted in movies, clients do sometimes flee, requiring pursuit by bounty hunters. With Paisner (co-author: Qaddafi's Point Guard: The Incredible Story of a Professional Basketball Player Trapped in Libya's Civil War, 2013, etc.), Judelson explains all this, and tells his life story, in a street-wise patois fortunately leavened by self-depreciation, as regarding his misspent youth: “I had a criminal history....Like an idiot, I didn’t think [the state would] run my fingerprints.” The author eventually discovered that a distant relative, “Uncle Phil” Konvitz, was “the go-to guy for bonds in the whole metropolitan area,” and he was able to ease his entry into this generally closed-off profession. Much of the narrative is a colloquial overview of Judelson’s success since then, which he modeled on Konvitz’s discreet power-broker style of networking on both sides of the law. The ambitious author first pursued business with prominent defense attorneys, who connected him with high-level organized crime clients. They are prudently left unnamed, but Judelson claims these “made men” hold him in the highest esteem. He is equally proud of his relationships with famous rappers and athletes who’ve dallied with guns and drugs (DMX, Plaxico Burress) and with some notorious upper-crust transgressors, like former IMF head Dominique Strauss-Khan: “No one had ever written a $5 million bail before.” The author intersperses these anecdotes with discussions of his long-suffering family and the intricate calculations involved in developing bond packages, resulting in a flavorful if disorganized exposé of this gritty corner of the underground.
Will appeal to readers of true crime and law enforcement narratives.Pub Date: June 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4516-9933-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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
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
SEEN & HEARD
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