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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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
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