A low-key but fascinating view of life behind bars that deserves a wide audience, if only as a deterrent to crime.
Set a thief to catch a thief—or, in this instance, a drug dealer to ferret out a murderer’s secrets.
Keene enjoyed a sterling youth, his parents pillars of the community, himself a football hero and, in early adulthood, the owner of several businesses. “Wherever I stayed,” he writes, “the latest Corvette was always in the driveway, with a crotch rocket and a Harley in the garage and a hot girl in the bedroom.” Fortunately, the rest of the book is better written, doubtless through the agency of veteran journalist Levin (Grand Delusions: The Cosmic Career of John DeLorean, 1983, etc.). Keene owed much of his material success to a friendly, business-savvy sideline as a drug dealer. When the law finally caught up to him, however, an especially vigorous prosecutor saw to it that he earned a ten-year prison term. A year later, the authors recount, that prosecutor came calling with a curious offer, asking Keene to cozy up to a convicted murderer to find out where he had buried one of his victims and secure evidence to link him with some 20 unsolved killings. In exchange, Keene would be released from prison. As Keene eventually learned, that killer, suitably deranged—“Sometimes I dream about killing women,” he told a police interrogator—had more victims to his credit than anyone had yet realized, but getting that information was a challenge, not just because of the legal requirements of the job but also because the killer was cagey. His hatred of the prosecutor helped, and in time Keene was able to gain the killer’s trust, learning of his carefully thought-out methods and getting “a solid confession out of him.”
A low-key but fascinating view of life behind bars that deserves a wide audience, if only as a deterrent to crime.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-55103-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2010
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author’s sincere sermon—at times analytical, at times hortatory—remains a hopeful one.
New York Times columnist Brooks (The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character and Achievement, 2011, etc.) returns with another volume that walks the thin line between self-help and cultural criticism.
Sandwiched between his introduction and conclusion are eight chapters that profile exemplars (Samuel Johnson and Michel de Montaigne are textual roommates) whose lives can, in Brooks’ view, show us the light. Given the author’s conservative bent in his column, readers may be surprised to discover that his cast includes some notable leftists, including Frances Perkins, Dorothy Day, and A. Philip Randolph. (Also included are Gens. Eisenhower and Marshall, Augustine, and George Eliot.) Throughout the book, Brooks’ pattern is fairly consistent: he sketches each individual’s life, highlighting struggles won and weaknesses overcome (or not), and extracts lessons for the rest of us. In general, he celebrates hard work, humility, self-effacement, and devotion to a true vocation. Early in his text, he adapts the “Adam I and Adam II” construction from the work of Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, Adam I being the more external, career-driven human, Adam II the one who “wants to have a serene inner character.” At times, this veers near the Devil Bugs Bunny and Angel Bugs that sit on the cartoon character’s shoulders at critical moments. Brooks liberally seasons the narrative with many allusions to history, philosophy, and literature. Viktor Frankl, Edgar Allan Poe, Paul Tillich, William and Henry James, Matthew Arnold, Virginia Woolf—these are but a few who pop up. Although Brooks goes after the selfie generation, he does so in a fairly nuanced way, noting that it was really the World War II Greatest Generation who started the ball rolling. He is careful to emphasize that no one—even those he profiles—is anywhere near flawless.
The author’s sincere sermon—at times analytical, at times hortatory—remains a hopeful one.Pub Date: April 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9325-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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