An engaging tale of the lifestyles of the rich-and-felonious parents of college-bound students.
A Fast Company senior writer gives a lively, soap-operatic account of the Operation Varsity Blues college admissions scandal that led to charges against more than 50 celebrities and other high rollers.
Fans of Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin who hope to see the stars vindicated will have to wait for another book. LaPorte suggests that the Hollywood power players were easy marks for the independent college counselor William “Rick” Singer, who used fake athletic profiles, bribery, and other tactics to get students into universities such as Yale, Georgetown, and USC. The actors and their ultrarich peers moved in private school circles that were “cesspools of insecurity about parenting”: “These were families who had been hiring tutors and outsourcing instruction in so many subjects for so long—the personal lacrosse coach, the Spanish tutor—parents were often loath to trust themselves when it came to advising their children.” Adding to parental anxieties were changing expectations at colleges, including that schools that once favored students with well-rounded portfolios have come to prefer a “pointy” applicant who “takes his or her singular passion and turbocharges it in creative ways.” Singer exploited status-conscious parents’ fears by claiming he could “guarantee” admission to high-prestige schools through a “side door,” which involved crimes such as bribing coaches and laundering money through his private “charity.” He also falsified applications after persuading students to give him their passwords to the Common App site and paid someone to take their SATs and ACTs at venues run by people he’d paid off. Though the narrative tone is largely gossipy, LaPorte ably covers all the aspects of the scandal, including the unique atmosphere of LA, where “extreme wealth and ambition collide, undercut by a shamelessly transactional attitude toward business.” Her fast-paced book has much to interest parents whose offspring are aiming for top-tier colleges.
An engaging tale of the lifestyles of the rich-and-felonious parents of college-bound students.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5387-1709-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A disturbing real-world procedural about “the bogeyman who couldn’t be found—until we found him.”
A first-person account of the long quest to bring a serial rapist and murderer to justice.
As district attorney of Sacramento County, California, Ho spearheaded a complex prosecution against Joseph DeAngelo, dubbed the Golden State Killer for his 13 proven murders in the 1970s and ’80s. As Ho reveals, his quarry’s crimes took an unsettling trajectory. As a teenager, DeAngelo thrived on bullying and petty crimes. He graduated to animal abuse, killing a dog with fireworks, and then turned his attention to humans. At first it was burglary in the small city of Visalia, 120 break-ins in a single year, 11 in a single night. He graduated to kidnapping, rape, and murder—some of his crimes committed while serving as a police officer; he was so prolific that he would be pegged the “East Area Rapist.” In the late 1980s DeAngelo’s decades-long pattern of crime quieted in Northern California, though only because he moved on to other California locations. He was finally apprehended more than 30 years after the fact through DNA and other identification technologies along with sheer logic. There Ho’s difficulties multiplied. For one, there was the question of where DeAngelo would be tried, since his crimes crossed many jurisdictions; as Ho recounts, one source of aggravation in particular was Orange County, its prosecutors jockeying for position in an election year. (“It ain’t gonna fucking happen!” Ho responded.) There were evidentiary issues, since many police departments had discarded relevant crime-scene materials decades earlier. Finally, there were legal concerns, some of which, as Ho lays them out, were complex technicalities. But in the end, as Ho’s careful, well-written account chronicles, DeAngelo was brought to justice, with one rape survivor saying at trial, succinctly, “Some people are wired wrong, and DeAngelo is one of them.”
A disturbing real-world procedural about “the bogeyman who couldn’t be found—until we found him.”Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9798890130358
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Third State Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
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