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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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SEEN & HEARD
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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