A meticulous but flat case is made here for a wrongful first- degree murder conviction. On her 21st birthday, in 1979, Laurencia ``Bambi'' Bembenek entered the Milwaukee police academy. Thus began the chain of events that, according to Radish (Journalism/Univ. of Wisconsin- Milwaukee), ended with Bembenek being framed for murder and receiving a life sentence. Dismissed from the force in her first year, Bembenek filed a discrimination suit against the MPD and married a detective—Elfred Schultz—after a two-month courtship. Soon, she began to suspect Schultz of continuing a relationship with his first wife, Christine—despite the detective's apparent bitter obsession with his having to pay the mortgage on the house that Christine now lived in without him. Within five months of Schultz's marriage to Bembenek, a disguised intruder murdered Christine with a single gunshot while she slept. Although Schultz had means (his off-duty gun was determined to be the murder weapon); motivation (he claimed that alimony and tax support were ruining him); and access (a key to the house), Bembenek was charged and convicted of Christine's murder. Radish details the incompetent defense Bembenek was given by an acquisitive (and later disbarred) attorney. After Bembenek's conviction, many came forth to protest, including a private detective who, working without pay for five years, unearthed evidence of an MPD cover-up. To date, however, Bembenek has been unable to receive a new trial. In 1990, she escaped to Canada, where (although imprisoned) she is petitioning for refugee status from the US. Paper-thin characterizations and minimal backgrounds dull Radish's narrative. Still, the author excels at factual accounts, and this could be grist for a TV movie. (Sixteen pages of photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: March 1, 1992
ISBN: 1-55972-103-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Birch Lane Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
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 autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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