Painstakingly researched, exhaustive and direct; true-crime enthusiasts will not be disappointed.
This debut true-crime book offers a meticulously detailed account of the Original Night Stalker, who terrorized California for years and was never caught.
In the mid- to late ’70s, a man dubbed the East Area Rapist committed a series of rapes in California. He was never apprehended for his crimes, and years later, all DNA testing could do was link the anonymous man to a string of unsolved murders attributed to someone the authorities had taken to calling the Original Night Stalker. Gray’s book discusses the crimes as if they were perpetrated by one person, known as the EAR-ONS, and Gray’s choice to outline the rapes/murders chronologically is a smart one, showing a man’s disturbing descent into progressively more hostile and lethal acts. The EAR-ONS’ assaults are presented in “phases” that reveal his frightening evolution—from targeting female victims to male/female couples; moving to other cities; and developing heightened aggression that featured biting. Gray approaches the material in a dispassionate tone, relaying the events like a report, with phases using subheaders such as Dates and Times, Modus Operandi, and Evidence. This, however, allows the book to focus on the more human qualities of the rapist-murderer; instead of treating the man like a monster, Gray deliberates on the ways in which the EAR-ONS evaded the police, in particular by wearing a mask and stopping his crimes altogether when the media coverage intensified. The book does occasionally become repetitive; at several different points, for instance, Gray notes the possibility that the EAR-ONS learned to conceal his identity from reading and watching detective movies and magazines. His “Personal Theory,” in which Gray essentially dramatizes the crimes from the killer’s perspective, is mostly reiteration made up of speculations that were voiced earlier in the book. The author also includes conjecture on how the EAR-ONS might have spent his childhood years and offers potential lessons, such as increasing citizen awareness via billboards—an approach that, as Gray mentions, has worked. Though not quite as scary as the author suggests—he recommends locking your door before reading the book—it is irrefutably unsettling; the EAR-ONS creeping into a house to unload the homeowners’ gun prior to an attack will make most readers shiver.
Painstakingly researched, exhaustive and direct; true-crime enthusiasts will not be disappointed.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2013
ISBN: 978-0615813059
Page Count: 292
Publisher: Freeway Books
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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