True-crime entertainment at its best.
Veteran true-crime author Olsen (Hastened to the Grave, 1998, etc.) explores the crimes and motivations of a truck-stop murderer.
In an alternating first-person/third-person account, Olsen relates the story of Keith Hunter Jesperson, a.k.a. The Happy Face Killer, who murdered eight women in the early- to mid-1990s in the West and Pacific Northwest. The narrative flashes back and forth between a suspenseful chronicle of the murders and Jesperson’s dysfunctional childhood. The black sheep of his family, brutalized physically and psychologically by his father, he grew into a powerful six-and-a-half-foot galoot capable of volcanic rage and with a penchant for torturing small animals. He drifted into a career as an over-the-road trucker, which offered the perfect half-invisible lifestyle for an angry loner. At first indulging his taste for rough, domineering sex with truck-stop prostitutes, Jesperson began to have homicidal fantasies and ultimately started murdering them by slow strangulation. Women who sold their bodies deserved their fate, he believed. He successfully eluded detection or suspicion but began to be plagued by guilt because two innocent people were wrongly jailed for his first murder; he deliberately became careless so that he could be tracked down and caught. The author examines various possible reasons why Jesperson became a serial killer, but his conclusion seems to be that given the right combination of harsh life experiences, rage, opportunity, and lack of self-control, almost anyone could go that route. The pretense of exploring and understanding Jesperson’s psychology is a bit of a sham, as the real purpose here seems to be to serve up a titillating account of squalid murders and violent sex. But for the genre, this is crackerjack stuff. Olsen obviously had thorough access to Jesperson (who is currently doing life), his family, and friends. One unexpected reward is the fascinating insider’s glimpse of the world of long-haul truckers.
True-crime entertainment at its best.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2002
ISBN: 0-312-24198-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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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