A convoluted, behind-the-scenes look at the Westchester County murder case that titillated tabloid readers with its purported parallels to the Hollywood shocker Fatal Attraction. Told by a reporter who covered the case for the Westchester Gannett newspaper chain, this overextended narrative features a trio of adulterers, an heiress-turned-murderer, shady p.i.s, and cops of staggering incompetence: sleaze and slapstick in the suburbs. In the late 80's, 25-year-old Carolyn Warmus, a computer instructor in Pleasantville, New York, was engaged in a torrid affair with married fellow-teacher Paul Solomon—whose wife, Betty Jeanne, was also having an affair. Despite having slept with several married men, Warmus became obsessed with Solomon and talked continually of marrying him—but he sidestepped commitment. When, in January 1989, Betty Jeanne was shot dead while home alone, suspicion centered on her husband, whose alibi was quickly proved false—at the time of the death, he actually had been on his way to a steamy rendezvous with Warmus. A report eventually surfaced that Warmus had recently purchased a handgun and silencer from a tawdry p.i. she'd hired to track another lover, but the gun was never found and the police investigation dragged on. Meanwhile, Solomon avoided Warmus and, less than six months after his wife's death, took up with another woman. Warmus lost control, dogging Solomon and his new love to Puerto Rico and harassing friends and relatives of the pair with threatening phone calls. Finally, Warmus was charged with Betty Jeanne's murder, largely on circumstantial evidence. The first trial ended in a hung jury but, in a retrial, the accused was found guilty. She's now serving a 25-year-to-life sentence. Overly detailed with legal technicalities, and the portrait of the spoiled and sociopathic Warmus remains vague and uninflected. Of interest, then, mostly for its revelations about police fumbling of the case. (Eight pages of b&w photographs—not seen)
Pub Date: June 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-385-41684-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1993
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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