Here comes the judge—and perpetrators in family court with their attorneys must pray that it isn't Judge Judy Sheindlin. She makes advocates of Tough Love look like marshmallow liberals. As a family court judge, Sheindlin deals with juvenile criminals, custody disputes, and so-called deadbeat dads, among other cases. After 23 years in the New York City court system, here are some of the ideas she advocates: To send teenage births plummeting, parents should be required to financially support their teenage children's children—sans welfare; foster care parents should be trained and licensed; parents on welfare should lose their benefits if a child drops out of school; and women who have more than one crack-addicted baby should be incarcerated. Here's another recommendation: Book a juvenile criminal as an adult—fingerprints, photographs and records that can be shared. (One chapter subheading reads, ``If Your Killer is Only Fifteen, Are You Any Less Dead?'') In essence, she says that America celebrates victims, but not the victims of crime. Instead, it is those perceived as victims of the social safety net, who have neither money or love enough to steer them from wrongdoing. Nonsense!, says Sheindlin. Every person is responsible for his or her acts, whether it is having babies or doing drugs. On the other hand, she is a strong advocate of birth control and of joint custody for parents. Mom is not always the best nurturer, says the judge, departing from conventional wisdom. (The book's title, which is of questionable taste, is a comment borrowed from her father.) Pithy and opinionated, with many real-life case histories, this book is an eye-opener for the politically left and an ``All Right!'' cheer for the right. ($50,000 ad/promo; author tour)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-06-017321-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1995
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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