A classically riveting crime tale, all the more fascinating for being true.
This historical crime debut details the life of a white-collar criminal who fled the United States for Venezuela in the early 20th century.
Civic leader and family man Henry Sanger Snow, from the Brooklyn Heights neighborhood of New York, was 51 years old in 1908, the year he lost his job as treasurer of the New York and New Jersey Telephone Company. Newspapers quickly began reporting that his wife and children were now financially compromised, primarily because police learned that Snow had been embezzling thousands of dollars from his company for years. Snow instructed his family and friends to convince investigators he’d soon surrender; he fled the country instead. He arrived in Venezuela, where he used the name Cyrus N. Clark to establish himself. An energetic liar and manipulator, he eventually procured for himself the position of vice consul and deputy consul in Caracas. Throughout World War I, he used the post to cause mayhem for his superiors, Thomas Voetter and Preston McGoodwin, all while ingratiating himself to the nation’s cruel dictator, Gen. Juan Vicente Gómez. In 1918, Clark became the sales manager for the Caribbean Petroleum Co. He spent the postwar years comfortably, even starting a new family while his American loved ones fell from their once-lofty place in society, missing both financial and emotional security. Veteran journalist Brandt follows Snow/Clark’s tracks in great depth through most of the 37 years he avoided justice. This window onto the early 20th century is wonderfully clear, bolstered by exuberant research. With minimal editorializing, Brandt offers the portrait of a narcissist who “spent his life charming people, winning them over, and making them accept whatever he said.” Brandt quotes from four diaries Snow left to his children, as well as government documents; with tremendous gall, Snow upbraided Voetter for firing him by saying “double-dealing, insincerity...and injustice will surely recoil upon the man who adopts them!” Also included are black-and-white photos. Tellingly, one with Snow and his children has been ripped in half.
A classically riveting crime tale, all the more fascinating for being true.Pub Date: April 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4935-0947-8
Page Count: 298
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 23, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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