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
A miscellany of paternal pride (and frustration) darkened by the author’s increasing realizations of his mortality.
Ruminations and reminiscences of an author—now in his 70s—about fatherhood, writing, and death.
O’Brien (July, July, 2002, etc.), who achieved considerable literary fame with both Going After Cacciato (1978) and The Things They Carried (1990), returns with an eclectic assembly of pieces that grow increasingly valedictory as the idea of mortality creeps in. (The title comes from the author’s uncertainty about his ability to assemble these pieces in a single volume.) He begins and ends with a letter: The initial one is to his first son (from 2003); the terminal one, to his two sons, both of whom are now teens (the present). Throughout the book, there are a number of recurring sections: “Home School” (lessons for his sons to accomplish), “The Magic Show” (about his long interest in magic), and “Pride” (about his feelings for his sons’ accomplishments). O’Brien also writes often about his own father. One literary figure emerges as almost a member of the family: Ernest Hemingway. The author loves Hemingway’s work (except when he doesn’t) and often gives his sons some of Papa’s most celebrated stories to read and think and write about. Near the end is a kind of stand-alone essay about Hemingway’s writings about war and death, which O’Brien realizes is Hemingway’s real subject. Other celebrated literary figures pop up in the text, including Elizabeth Bishop, Andrew Marvell, George Orwell, and Flannery O’Connor. Although O’Brien’s strong anti-war feelings are prominent throughout, his principal interest is fatherhood—specifically, at becoming a father later in his life and realizing that he will miss so much of his sons’ lives. He includes touching and amusing stories about his toddler sons, about the sadness he felt when his older son became a teen and began to distance himself, and about his anguish when his sons failed at something.
A miscellany of paternal pride (and frustration) darkened by the author’s increasing realizations of his mortality.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-618-03970-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
What we've all been awaiting: the first of Hemingway's posthumous works he began in 1958 and finished in 1960. This is a memoir of his expatriate days in the twenties, and MacLeish's little poem about the young man with the panther good looks who whittled a style for his times in the sawmill attic in Paris comes to life here. What also comes to light is the "inside story," or the very personal revelations, parts of whicy may become a cause scandale. Not only is the Fitzgerald portrait ungenerous, but the disclosures of his sexual difficulties with Zelda are embarrassing. Miss Stein is also victimized, and there are allusions to puzzling perversities. Pound, Ford, Eliot, Lewis and Joyce are around and they are treated with affection, or affectionate malice. The best passages are the descriptive ones— fine writing with all the supple surety of Sun— of bookstalls, cafes, streets, the Seine, race tracks, and travel. And of course there's Hemingway on his wife Hadley, and Hemingway on Hemingway..... Mary McCarthy's famous attack on Salinger scored him for following Papa's special club of OK people (like him) versus the "others" (unlike him). The memoir has something of that snobbery and certain people may go after it accordingly. Still, whatever the indiscretions, it is an important work, a literary source from a master. There can be little doubt of its interest and attraction for many as a reprise of a now legendary time when Hemingway was young and happy and "invulnerable," and a place— well, "There is never any ending to Paris.
Pub Date: May 5, 1964
ISBN: 0684833638
Page Count: 207
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1964
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