An alluring and adventurous ride through a criminal underworld.
Fillmore’s debut memoir chronicles how he fell into business with international heroin smugglers.
The opening lines of this remembrance plunge readers into action at the Nigerian border as chaos ensues over a lost bag of heroin. The author then looks back on his first assignment for a smuggling ring, and he recalls the initial intoxication of joining a crowd of 20-something college grads, desperate to bust “out of the narrow confines of our lives” by smuggling heroin into the United States from Europe. However, Fillmore’s “beginner’s luck” quickly ended when heroin went missing and he was forced to swear his allegiance to Alhaji, a Nigerian drug boss. Over the course of the book, Fillmore gracefully articulates the illusory charm of crime, which kept him and his business partner, Claire, coming back to Alhaji and his trade: “We simply did not conceive of ourselves as criminals,” he confesses, revealing the callowness of youth. But when the author was arrested by Drug Enforcement Administration agents and sentenced to four years in a maximum-security prison, he finally had to reckon with the “indignity of renouncing my actions.” Fillmore’s journey is replete with incredible, cinematic visual details, as well as a motley crew of characters, such as “fishermen lacquered in blood and fish scales.” His narration shows impressive thoughtfulness and clarity, even as he relates his journey at a breakneck pace. However, he sometimes glosses over piquant details that might have made for an even more engaging story; for instance, readers learn very little about the days leading up to Fillmore’s first assignment, when he and his colleagues “drink and plot, immersing ourselves in the details, arrivals, departures, in order to distract ourselves from the larger meaning of our travels.”
An alluring and adventurous ride through a criminal underworld.Pub Date: Nov. 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-578-40348-9
Page Count: 290
Publisher: iambic Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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