Casts intriguing new light on a famous unsolved mystery. (8 pp. b&w photos, not seen)
The life and colorful times of a New York State Supreme Court justice who went missing one warm August evening in 1930.
Ever since, numerous magazine articles and many book chapters have contemplated the celebrated case of Joseph Force Crater, but this appears to be the first book entirely devoted to the classic mystery since his widow’s unsurprisingly partial account in 1961. Given the paucity of available evidence, Wall Street Journal assistant publisher Tofel has chosen to focus on the political history behind Crater’s disappearance, painting a mordant picture of the fading Tammany machine and the judge’s place in it as they “approached the vanishing point together.” In 1930, Jimmy Walker was Mayor of Broadway (and only incidentally of the rest of the city), FDR was governor of the Empire State, and the price of a seat on the bench was approximately a year’s judicial salary. This was the world from which Crater suddenly vanished, not long after making large withdrawals of cash that his wife discovered some weeks later in their New York apartment. The judge was last seen on Wednesday, August 6, after dinner with some acquaintances, headed for a musical show. His wife was at their home upstate. Without a telephone, she wasn’t immediately concerned when she did not hear from her husband. After some time, however, she concluded that he was murdered, or at least so she claimed to the insurance company. Tofel, less certain of foul play, offers a plausible alternative involving madam Polly Adler. The judge was declared dead in 1939, and the case was closed by the NYPD in 1979 after a fruitless half-century. Tofel’s surmise about what happened to Judge Crater would explain why his disappearance wasn’t investigated terribly vigorously.
Casts intriguing new light on a famous unsolved mystery. (8 pp. b&w photos, not seen)Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2004
ISBN: 1-56663-605-1
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Ivan Dee/Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2004
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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