There is a reason why true crime sells, of course, especially when it involves famous people: A blend of gore, fame, and...
The rapid-fire tale of one of the most infamous true-crime stories of the past decade.
As Patterson (The People vs. Alex Cross, 2017, etc.) and Abramovich (Bullies: A Friendship, 2016) demonstrate early on, Aaron Hernandez (1989-2017) appeared to have it all. A football star in Connecticut, he was recruited to play at the University of Florida, where he was a standout tight end. Although there were a few whispers of behavioral issues when he was in Gainesville that led to him dropping in the NFL draft, Hernandez was drafted by the New England Patriots. His trajectory continued to rise in the NFL, where he made the Pro Bowl and eventually earned a contract extension worth $40 million. Then it all went awry. In 2015, Hernandez was convicted of the 2013 murder of his fiancee’s sister’s boyfriend and later put on trial—though acquitted—for a double murder in Boston that happened before the murder for which he was convicted (and which the authors clearly believe he committed). The handsome and charming but volatile football star was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole; in 2017, he was found dead in his cell of an apparent suicide. As can be expected in any book with Patterson’s name on the cover, the authors tell the Hernandez tale in page-churning fashion. The book, just over 380 pages of text, contains 97 chapters as well as a prologue, coda, and epilogue, virtually none more than five pages long, most three or four. This approach will undoubtedly keep readers moving, but it also leaves little room for depth and nuance. The book also lacks footnotes, endnotes, a bibliography, or any other sourcing.
There is a reason why true crime sells, of course, especially when it involves famous people: A blend of gore, fame, and voyeurism is a compelling mixture in our violent, fame-obsessed society. There is also a reason why the genre has a reputation for gratuitousness. A middling true-crime saga that fails to answer a significant question: Why?Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-41265-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2018
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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