Pedestrian account of the investigation and trial of an unusually monstrous parricide. On March 31, 1984, Judias Buenoano was convicted of first- degree murder, and is now on Florida's death row. Buenoano poisoned two husbands and her son; when arsenic left the boy only partially paralyzed, she took him fishing and shoved him (he wore steel leg braces weighing 50 pounds) out of the boat. She then blew up her boyfriend in his car—the crime that led to her arrest. Shortly before killing her victims, she took out multiple life-insurance policies on them, and for 12 years evaded discovery by moving to new communities. Anderson and McGehee, an N.Y.C. husband-and-wife writing-producing team, re-create the story through a chronicle- -assembled through interviews and court and medical records—of the work of Ted Chamberlain, the Pensacola detective who made the case against the killer. Buenoano is an interesting murderess, and the authors vividly re-create the milieu in which she operated. Their invented dialogue, however, is wooden when supplying narrative detail (``The victim, a John Gentry, white male, thirty-six, had already been taken to Sacred Heart Hospital...'') and clichÇd when used to convey personality (``That's mighty white of you buddy''). Through this clumsy treatment, Chamberlain comes off as a brooding Neanderthal. Since Buenoano was an inept killer and making the case against her was a routine assembling of evidence, the real interest in her story is psychological: One wishes that instead of padding their book with court testimony (more than 100 pages), the authors had probed deeper into Buenoano's background. Buenoano's madness harks back to Victorian England, when coldblooded and elaborately schemed murders of families by a spouse were more common; even contrasted to those, the crime here is particularly heinous. A book that students of murder will want to have despite its flaws. (Eight pages of photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-8184-0542-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1991
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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