by Thomas McKenna & William Harrington ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 10, 1996
Detective first grade McKenna has seen firsthand many of the most notorious cases in recent Manhattan history and reports the facts in the streetwise patois of a seasoned gumshoe. McKenna joined the force in 1965 and quickly climbed through the ranks until he became a detective and a member of the elite Hostage Negotiating Team. He was directly involved in the Preppie Murder case, the investigation of the Central Park ``wilding'' in which a female jogger was beaten senseless by a gang of youths, and countless sordid crimes of passion and stupidity. He also recounts cases involving the odd, bleakly comic misadventures of the drug-addled, and he opens a fascinating window onto the riotous days of the late '60s in New York. But it's the most infamous crimes in Manhattan that form the backbone of this book. McKenna was often the first detective on the scene, and he ably describes the initial, depressing look at the crime and what may have happened. The Preppie Murder (in which a teenager from Manhattan's upper-class Upper East Side was killed by a former lover after what he described as ``rough sex'') is particularly well discussed, and McKenna's compassion for the victim rings true. It is unfortunate, however, that the detective offers no fresh insights into these crimes or into the criminal character. It is also unfortunate that the narrative foregrounds the ``as told to'' element by frequently mentioning cowriter Harrington, and McKenna's repeated refrain that all races and genders are welcome on the police force borders on harping. Written in a shorthand reminiscent of police reports, this is nevertheless an entertaining and attractive read.
Pub Date: April 10, 1996
ISBN: 0-312-14010-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
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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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