Maroney deglamorizes the world of private investigators while limning their sometimes essential, sometimes damaging work.
A revealing look at the world of the private detective, which isn’t quite as Raymond Chandler imagined it.
“We are everywhere,” Maroney writes of detectives employed by private concerns rather than governments. Having begun his career, like so many PIs, in journalism (academia is another field ripe for recruitment), he reels off employers: large companies, movie studios, wealthy individuals, media outlets, even some government agencies, all of which need some critical piece of information. This can be of a rather sleazy nature—e.g., a juicy detail that will undo a spouse’s divorce proceedings or, in the case of the disgraced entertainment executive Harvey Weinstein, “compromising information on women Weinstein had allegedly victimized (such as Rose McGowan) and journalists whose articles Weinstein sought to quash (such as Jodi Kantor).” The classic PI modus operandi involves disguising one’s identity and deceiving—or, in polite parlance, socially engineering—one’s way into the confidence of the person who holds the desired information. Sometimes this is criminal, sometimes not, but in any event, Maroney pointedly observes, the behavior is ubiquitous and lucrative. It is especially lucrative for the hackers in the PI world, who steal into offices in the middle of the night and copy sensitive computer data without attracting attention or suspicion—a pro tip, Maroney offers, is to remove a hard drive from a computer before copying it off, since USB connections and computer logs tell tales. Having cracked a company’s system, the PI is then often hired to build an electronic fortress around it, double-dipping at its best. There’s more poor Joe Schmo than James Bond in the whole enterprise, writes the author, and the ethics are iffy (“sometimes our work benefits the social good; sometimes we are the instruments of moral outrage”). Whatever the case, being a corporate/private detective is a growth industry, and it’s not going anywhere anytime soon, which says something about the world in which we live.
Maroney deglamorizes the world of private investigators while limning their sometimes essential, sometimes damaging work.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-59463-259-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
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
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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