Washington lawyer and filmmaker Goldfarb on his experiences in the Kennedy Justice Department during Kennedy's war on organized crime. In 1961 President Kennedy steamrollered the opposition of almost all concerned and named his brother attorney general. At the time, Robert Kennedy was seen as legally untried, a hatchet man, a McCarthy associate—a zealous but injudicious man. Seven years later he sent the needle off the hagiograph. He had the vision thing down cold. Kennedy's transformation from henchman to hero began at the Justice Department as he took on a national institution that was tolerated insofar as it was recognized- -organized crime. He was the first to shed light on the problem and then actively address it, building his reputation while creating powerful enemies. Goldfarb tells the story of those days and their possible effect in terms of the later assassinations of both President Kennedy and his brother. This is basically a memoir of a time and place. Goldfarb is an experienced writer and is not insensitive to the telling detail. His characters, including ``Bob'' (as RFK was called by his colleagues), have substance. But Goldfarb has little to add save his personal reminiscences, charming though they may be. He is not steeped in assassination lore. Conclusion: ``Based on circumstantial evidence, the likelihood is that our organized crime program prompted Hoffa, Marcello, and Trafficante to plot an audacious assassination: First it was to be of Robert Kennedy, and later the plan shifted to JFK.'' The better things in the book have to do with Goldfarb's work trying to clean up wild and woolly Newport, Ky., the ``Gomorrah of America,'' according to a local clergyman. A likeable book. There is enjoyment in the tale of a career, and Goldfarb tells the tale well. His assassination theorizing, however, is informed but innocuous. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-43565-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1995
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 2025 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.
