A riveting, sensational, unforgettable autobiography.
A sister’s incriminating memoir exposing her abusive upbringing and a brother’s felonious misdeeds.
Former Dutch criminal lawyer Holleeder, who wrote her unsparing memoir in complete secrecy, retraces the history behind the notoriously ruthless past of her gangster kingpin brother Willem (aka Wim). She compellingly recounts the first coldblooded attempt on her brother-in-law Cor van Hout’s life, then flashes back through a miserably dysfunctional childhood with three other siblings, all tormented by an abusive “megalomaniac” father in a brutish household where “crying was forbidden.” Despite her father’s tyrannical rule, Wim emerged as the greatest source of familial horror as the family became “worn out by the terror that had passed from father to son.” Wim was implicated alongside van Hout in the 1983 kidnapping of Freddy Heineken, and both served lengthy jail sentences. But Wim’s reign of crime was just beginning. Fresh out of prison, unrepentant, “cold and heartless,” Wim demandingly insinuated himself into Holleeder’s and her sister Sonja’s personal lives, upending them both. In a brisk and vividly descriptive narrative, the author spares no detail as she chronicles the fearful years following an attempt on van Hout’s life, noting that subsequent attacks were sure to follow. A third assassination attempt mutilated van Hout in public as Wim also deployed a string of extortion plots and contract killings across Amsterdam. Legal proceedings and jail sentences followed, while a frustrated Holleeder kept seeing her brother released to continue his reign of Mafia-style crime. Processing feelings of guilt and betrayal while clearly risking her life, the author began cooperating with the Justice Department. She testified against Wim and then visited him in prison wearing a recording device to pick up his confession to orchestrating van Hout’s murder. Currently in hiding as the case proceeds, Holleeder has written a harrowing, courageous account of murder and family loyalty while sacrificing her career and her identity in the process.
A riveting, sensational, unforgettable autobiography.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-47530-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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