English provides an intriguing angle for hard-core mob enthusiasts or followers of the Bulger story, who will eat it up....
English (The Savage City: Race, Murder, and a Generation on the Edge, 2011, etc.) explores the organized crime underworld of Whitey Bulger.
The author has covered similar ground in Paddy Whacked (2005), and it shows in a number of ways, some that enrich the telling of the Bulger saga and some that detract. Bulger was a gangster who moved through the ranks of the Boston underworld to control much of it beginning in the 1970s. With what seemed at the time like a bulletproof coating keeping him safe, he was a formidable foe. After being tipped off to a possible arrest in 1995, Bulger disappeared. Two years later, the world finally learned the secret of Bulger’s near-magical ability to stay in business: he had been an FBI informant for almost 20 years, and the FBI had covered up evidence of his crimes in order to keep him on the payroll. When Bulger was caught in 2011, the question on English’s mind was whether or not the trial would reveal the circumstances that allowed Bulger to flourish. It did not, and the author makes a convincing case that this was a major oversight. He presents solid evidence that the Bulger problem was really an FBI corruption problem and that the world should be far more concerned with the system than just the one man. However, English’s evidence also presents a problem. He is so familiar with Bulger’s story and territory that he does not address the fact that readers may not know the background. This leaves the story of the trial, at least, curiously incomplete. The narrative is inconsistent, with extremely compelling sections alternating with excessively detailed sections that distract rather than add color.
English provides an intriguing angle for hard-core mob enthusiasts or followers of the Bulger story, who will eat it up. Those without prior knowledge, however, may lose interest.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-229098-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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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