Self-regarding but revealing.
Intimate memoir of the criminal underground from an atypically blue-collar art thief.
Connor was the scion of Mayflower descendants fallen on hard times on one side, the son of an Irish cop on the other, a black sheep to both sets of relatives. Born in 1943, he grew up in Milton, Mass., near Boston. He chafed against New England’s strict class divisions, developing in adolescence a rebelliousness that seemed somewhat incongruous with his love of fine art and antiques. Yet Connor suggests that class snobbery propelled him toward his vocation: “The first time I wandered into the Forbes Museum, their contempt was palpable…they could tell just by looking that I wasn’t one of them.” He got even by pulling off his first art-museum robbery at the Forbes in 1965, around the same time he was finding some success playing rock ’n’ roll guitar in nightclubs. (The lifestyle of the gangsters he encountered on the club circuit was another factor drawing him to a career in crime.) Connor fancied himself a prodigy, but his brazen crimes brought punishment soon enough; at 22 he was arrested for burglarizing a Maine mansion, but only after shooting at the pursuing officer. He escaped from jail using a soap-bar gun, cementing his reputation in the New England underworld. Tracked down in Boston, he engaged in another extended gun battle and chase. The enraged officers retaliated by beating him severely when they finally cornered him, and by framing him for a series of unsolved rapes, which offended him deeply: “I have always lived by a strong code of ethics when it comes to civilians.” The rape conviction was eventually overturned, and he was free to pursue further criminal schemes. In 1975, he stole a Rembrandt from Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and used it as a bargaining chip to avoid standing trial for another theft. Connor seems very taken with his own daring and panache, and the narrative, co-written by novelist Siler, focuses on his criminal glamour rather than the nitty-gritty mechanics of his devious deeds.
Self-regarding but revealing.Pub Date: May 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-167228-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Collins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2009
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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