Having chronicled the digital-data brigandage of the notorious Kevin Mitnick (The Fugitive Game, 1996), Littman casts a cool, discerning eye on Kevin Poulsen, who led law-enforcement agencies in a merry chase along the Information Highway. Drawing on extensive interviews with 31-year-old Poulsen, his partners in crime, and the cops who chased them down, the author offers an absorbing, evenhanded portrait of the hacker as a dangerous young man. A technical virtuoso before he was out of his teens and in trouble with authorities early on, the disaffected young Californian (whose on-line alias, The Watchman, was taken from the antihero of a dark-side comic series) also held responsible programming jobs at both SRI and Sun Microsystems before his Pacific Tel break-ins and other computer felonies made him officially unemployed. Going outlaw on a full-time basis, Poulsen trespassed on the memory banks of machines linked by modem on the Internet, exposed the security weaknesses of government and university installations, played embarrassing pranks on rivals, and otherwise showcased his considerable talents for electronic wizardry. He rigged a contest run by an L.A. radio station (by diverting its phone lines) and collected a couple of Porsches as prizes. He also managed to ferret out wiretaps Big Brother's helpers (FBI, Secret Service, et al.) had planted on the ACLU, foreign consulates, suspected mobsters, and others. Despite his professed allegiance to a hacker code, Poulsen was not fastidious about profiting from his skills, putting them at the disposal of call-girl rings and shady private detectives. Eventually brought to book in 1990 on a wealth of charges, the chronic offender was allowed to cop a plea in the interests of protecting the feds' dirtier secrets. An arresting account of the career of a New Age intruder whose capacity to strike at will mocks the very notion of computer privacy and security. (photos, not seen)
Pub Date: March 31, 1997
ISBN: 0-316-52857-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1997
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
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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