A weird story, luridly related.
The beyond-bizarre life and death of America’s most notorious atheist.
Broadcast journalist Dracos adopts a tabloid-TV style and tough-guy diction (“six-figure bequests came in like trained pigs”) in his rambling, sensational, idiosyncratic account of the rise and fall of the woman many Americans loved to hate. (She was the featured guest on Phil Donahue’s initial show and did not appear on his last only because she’d been murdered by then.) The author begins with the grisly discovery in a remote Texas location of the remains of Madalyn Murray O’Hair, her son, and her granddaughter. Then he returns to the birth in 1919 of Madalyn Elizabeth Mays, who rejected religion as a teenager, served as a WAC in WWII, and changed her name for the first time after she married a man named Roths, only to divorce him when she became pregnant by bomber pilot William Murray. She acquired a law degree—though she never passed the bar, sniffs Dracos—and was enraged to discover there was compulsory prayer in her son’s Baltimore school and filed suit. The US Supreme Court eventually ruled in her favor, banning school prayer, and her career was launched. Dracos charts her steps forward and back, discusses her surprising wealth, her free-spending life, and her flights to avoid prosecution. The author mercilessly depicts his subject’s ballooning weight, her lack of interest in personal hygiene, her abrasive language, her crusty ways. Covering the murder, Dracos depicts the insouciant Austin police as basically uninterested, crediting a young private eye and a couple of journalists for cracking the case. O’Hair’s killer was one of her employees, an ex-con named David Waters, whom she trusted completely. He and his accomplices kidnapped her and her family, held them until they liquidated their assets, then strangled and butchered them. Dracos captures the whole sordid tale in alarmist, colloquial, and crude prose.
A weird story, luridly related.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-2833-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2003
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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