Reuters journalist Follain relates the life, crimes, and capture of the world’s best-known terrorist. Yet the Jackal eludes him, refusing to open his mind and motivation to the author. —Carlos the Jackal— was born in Venezuela to an affluent family whose father was a committed Marxist. He went on to be educated in London and Paris, and then in Moscow. His career as a terrorist began in Moscow when he made contact with the radical organization the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. On behalf of the Popular Front, Carlos carried out a series of bombings and assassinations, culminating in the kidnapping of 11 OPEC oil ministers in Vienna in 1975. After being expelled from the Popular Front for insubordination, Carlos became more or less a freelance revolutionary. He established a small army of followers that killed 24 people and wounded another 257. He was finally captured in 1994 by French authorities in Sudan and is serving a life sentence in France. That Carlos was able to elude capture for 20 years had to do, explains the author, both with the willingness of certain nations, particularly Libya, to shelter him and fund his activities, and with the inept attempts by Western security services to capture him. Indeed, the book is at its best when discussing these topics, but Carlos himself remains an enigmatic figure. Overweight and something of a dandy, he does not fit the mold of hardened terrorist. Despite his Marxist background, he seems anything but doctrinaire, having little to say on his political motivations. Undisciplined and aloof, he was hardly a tool for the Soviet Union. But despite Follain’s having a limited correspondence with Carlos, the Jackal refused to reveal himself and his motives, and even after efforts to interview those who knew him firsthand, Carlos remains a shadowy figure. A good factual account that fails to delve deeper into the enigma that was Carlos the Jackal. (b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-55970-466-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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