A savage, unrelenting tale.
A spellbinding narrative of drugs, death and debauchery as told by one of America's most notorious criminals.
Cocaine trafficker Roberts and Vanity Fair contributor Wright (Hella Nation: Looking for Happy Meals in Kandahar, Rocking the Side Pipe, Wingnut's War Against the GAP, and Other Adventures with the Totally Lost Tribes of America, 2009, etc.) team up to recount Roberts' unflinchingly brutal coming-of-age amid the crime-soaked underworld of New York City and beyond. Yet to call Roberts just a cocaine trafficker hardly does the man justice. He was a hustler on every front—from his humble beginnings ripping off drug deals to his ascent to the highest level of drug kingpins. Told primarily through Roberts' firsthand account (as well as the occasional insertion by Wright and Roberts' associates), the book reads like a how-to guide for criminals: "My father was careful not to hit people in the face who owed him money…you might kill him, and then you won't collect your money.” Equally disconcerting are Roberts' tips on disposing of a body, noting that the trick is to separate the guts from the rest when dumping a corpse into the ocean: “The reason bodies float is because the juices inside the guts make gases.” After being charged with kidnapping early in his criminal career, Roberts joined the army and served in Vietnam in an effort to avoid prison time. In the jungles of Southeast Asia, Roberts' insatiable bloodlust began to flourish; he describes one instance in which a VC soldier was skinned alive, noting simply, "Our amusement was finding new ways to make the bad ones suffer.” The author recounts his brutal crimes against man and morality in an off-handed manner, confirming Roberts' assertion, "I don't have a conscience"—an assessment with which readers will likely to agree.
A savage, unrelenting tale.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-45042-5
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2011
Actor, director, producer Grodin (How I Get Through Life, 1992) makes an appearance as a purveyor of theatrical anecdotes. Noel Coward he's not. Written between takes during the production of his recent film Heart and Souls, this disjointed effort to depict Grodin's career as Mister Showbiz is not uniformly dull, to be sure, but the proud exhibitions of putative wit are wan indeed. After a Nixonesque assertion that, unlike the characters he has played, he is ``not a jerk,'' Grodin recounts all the clever things he's done and said. Obviously, he is no jerk, but with banalities on the order of ``sometimes life feels so short and strange,'' he's not the deepest thinker, either. This backstager sometimes reads like a parody of personal hype. ``Forgive me for this self-aggrandizement,'' he apologizes parenthetically, ``I'm trying to make a point about stupidity.'' It's not all self-centered. For example, there are comments about others—like those who didn't dig his oblique wit or couldn't handle his success. Names drop like hailstones. ``Danny Thomas was a friend of mine whom I knew through his daughter, my friend Marlo.'' Otto Preminger and Diane Sawyer, Art Carney and Oliver Stone, Gilda, Johnny, and Dustin all serve as second bananas to our Chuck. Conversations are recalled, oddly, as scripted dialogue in this stream of self-consciousness. The text begins with spirit as Grodin denies close relationship with most of the ``100 Most Powerful People in Hollywood'' and gains strength again near the end with a diary of the making of Heart and Souls, which has since turned out to be a very modest box-office draw. But, on the whole, the occasional author and full-time light comedian upstages all, including himself. If not quite a bomb, Grodin's latest presentation isn't a hit, either. It's just a dud. (First serial to Premiere; author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 3, 1994
ISBN: 0-02-545795-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
As is to be expected from Lessing (The Real Thing; 1992, etc.), whose clear and always intelligent no-nonsense writing has explored subjects that transcend the commonplace, this first volume of her autobiography reflects all her remarkable strengths. The year of her birth, 1919, was auspicious neither for her parents in particular nor for the world in general. The ill-matched Taylers had married not out of love but out of a mutual need to expunge the horror of the recently ended world war, which had maimed Lessing's father both physically and mentally — he'd lost a leg in battle, but more important, be was embittered by what he considered Britain's poor treatment of her soldiers. Her mother, an able nurse, had lost a fiancÉ, and marriage now seemed to offer only the consolation of children. These disappointments, exacerbated by the harsh life in rural Zimbabwe (then Southern Rhodesia), where her family settled after a stint in Persia, would indelibly shape Lessing. She quarreled frequently with her mother, whose well-meaning strictures she resented; observed her father's despair and his failures as a settler-farmer; and resolved that she would not live like them — "I will not, I will not!" — even if it meant defying convention. Which she did, as she left her first husband and their two children for another man — Gottried Lessing; joined the local Communist Party in the midst of WW II "because of the spirit of the times, because of the Zeitgeist"; and then moved in 1949 permanently to London. Like so many bright and alienated provincials, Lessing found an escape in voracious reading. Though determined to be a writer, the consuming distractions of motherhood, wartime society, and political activities frustrated this ambition for a long time. Refreshingly, not a self-indulgent mea culpa, but a brutally frank examination of how Lessing became what she is — a distinguished writer, a woman who has lived life to the full, and a constant critic of cant.
Pub Date: Sept. 22, 1994
ISBN: 0-06-017150-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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