An absorbed reporter grippingly relays the story of a rare trade and the troubled family relations of a talented grifter.
Expanding on his Rolling Stone article, first-time author Kersten tenders a lawbreaker’s script about fake money and an alternative lifestyle, told largely from the viewpoint of the fascinating perp.
Engaging and accomplished counterfeiter Art Williams had a truly rotten childhood, according to the memories he shared with the author. After considerable bad behavior, Dad skipped out, leaving the kids with certifiably crazy Mom. Gangs dictated life and death on the gritty streets of Chicago’s worst neighborhood. Yet there Williams was mentored by benevolent Pete “DaVinci,” a clever printer of bank notes. One day, his teacher was gone, and the young student, with native pluck and instinctive smarts, manfully clawed his way to the top of the counterfeiting heap. Ironically, he only got into trouble with the law after a breakup with a girlfriend led him to sell off his printing equipment, move to Texas and take up robbery. Nabbed in a jewelry heist, he did six years in the Texas penal system and emerged in 1999 swearing he’d stick to bad bills. But the familiar old currency was being supplanted by the “New Note,” whose enhanced paper, watermarks, security strips and microprinting were nearly impossible to replicate. Not for the inventive and proficient Williams, who produced a creditable bogus hundred using glues, sprays, ink, paper, press, camera, scanner and laptop. He wholesaled his product at 30 cents on the dollar, but it was more exciting to pass it on road trips with family and friends. It’s estimated that Williams stimulated his own economy with some $10 million in counterfeit before he was nabbed. His downfall resulted from family problems, especially misplaced filial consideration. Where is our hero now? Just where you would expect, considering that he’s a recidivist.
An absorbed reporter grippingly relays the story of a rare trade and the troubled family relations of a talented grifter.Pub Date: June 11, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-592-40446-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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