Will appeal to readers of true crime and law enforcement narratives.
Acidic account of the little-understood profession of bail bondsman.
“You don’t want to need to call me—but I’m a good guy to have on your side if you do,” writes Judelson, who is unapologetic about the strange inverse morality of being determined to provide for his clients’ well-being despite, in many cases, their involvement in serious crime: “I don’t give a shit if you’re innocent. That’s not my problem.” Furthermore, each bond Judelson writes represents major financial risk; as depicted in movies, clients do sometimes flee, requiring pursuit by bounty hunters. With Paisner (co-author: Qaddafi's Point Guard: The Incredible Story of a Professional Basketball Player Trapped in Libya's Civil War, 2013, etc.), Judelson explains all this, and tells his life story, in a street-wise patois fortunately leavened by self-depreciation, as regarding his misspent youth: “I had a criminal history....Like an idiot, I didn’t think [the state would] run my fingerprints.” The author eventually discovered that a distant relative, “Uncle Phil” Konvitz, was “the go-to guy for bonds in the whole metropolitan area,” and he was able to ease his entry into this generally closed-off profession. Much of the narrative is a colloquial overview of Judelson’s success since then, which he modeled on Konvitz’s discreet power-broker style of networking on both sides of the law. The ambitious author first pursued business with prominent defense attorneys, who connected him with high-level organized crime clients. They are prudently left unnamed, but Judelson claims these “made men” hold him in the highest esteem. He is equally proud of his relationships with famous rappers and athletes who’ve dallied with guns and drugs (DMX, Plaxico Burress) and with some notorious upper-crust transgressors, like former IMF head Dominique Strauss-Khan: “No one had ever written a $5 million bail before.” The author intersperses these anecdotes with discussions of his long-suffering family and the intricate calculations involved in developing bond packages, resulting in a flavorful if disorganized exposé of this gritty corner of the underground.
Will appeal to readers of true crime and law enforcement narratives.Pub Date: June 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4516-9933-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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