In an account burdened by hazy reportage and sloppy writing, private investigator Pe§a's caseload, dazzling though it may be, reads like so many tall tales. Pe§a, an investigator with the detective agency Lynch International since 1966, gives the inside scoop on some of his investigations—the case of the Frito Lay kickbacks, the nasty corporate espionage war between Jordache and Guess? Jeans. With two coauthors in addition to Pe§a, the narrative clearly suffers from the too-many-cooks syndrome; Pe§a's ``files'' are an awkward meld of B-movie dialogue (``Man, was I naãve'') and amateurish attempts at setting the scene. The first few chapters, which focus on organized crime as represented by the the Scallino and Franzese families, seem included less for their value or relevance than for the fact that Matera, who covered these particular goombahs in his book Quitting the Mob, clearly enjoys the story. The dozens of references to 500-lb. head goon Larry Iorizzo as ``the fat man'' grow wearisome, and unsubtle insights like ``Everybody knows that attorneys have the morals of alley cats'' are scattered through the tough-talking text. Some of the later cases, particularly the Jordache-Marciano crime, promise a fascinating look at the tangled web connecting the IRS, private industry, big politics, and the media. But the intricacies of the case are lost amid glossed-over details, cornball dialogue, and Pe§a's frantic push to let readers know how bad the cops and the FBI are, compared with him. With three authors, it might be expected that at least one could have managed to show rather than tell. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Aug. 7, 1996
ISBN: 0-06-039175-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1996
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
