It’s too bad Harris didn’t take the trouble to document his sources, because if everything he says can be supported, he’s...
A rollicking but slippery rendition of the prosecution of the pockmarked potentate of Panama.
Harris (The Last Stand, 1996), who began his career as an antiwar activist, now produces investigative journalism of the big screen, good-guys-vs.-bad-guys variety. Here the bad guys are Manuel Noriega, the Medellín cocaine cartel, and especially the members of the Reagan and Bush administrations who came into contact with them. The good guys are a couple of underdog DEA agents and federal prosecutors in Miami who busted through the old boys’ network to investigate and indict Noriega—an indictment that, ironically, led to an invasion of Panama championed by many of the general’s former protectors. The story is told colorfully, with lots of tough-guy cop-talk, scummy informers, and brief cutaways to beleaguered wives. It’s unquestionably readable, even if the outcome is too well-known to generate much suspense. There are even a few moments (such as the anecdote an informer relates to DEA agent Steve Grilli about Noriega’s escapades in an airplane cockpit) that rise to the level of classic tragicomedy. But Harris’s storytelling inspires no more trust than Hollywood’s. He provides no notes or attributions, even for direct quotes. He misrepresents legal issues integral to the case, for example confusing jurisdiction and venue. He coyly avoids names, even of obvious public figures, perhaps for legal reasons. And his tone is so stridently anti–Cold War and anti-Reagan that it’s hard to give his sloppy techniques the benefit of the doubt.
It’s too bad Harris didn’t take the trouble to document his sources, because if everything he says can be supported, he’s written an accessible, eye-opening account of one of the murkiest episodes in recent history. But it’s hard to take him seriously on his own merits.Pub Date: May 21, 2001
ISBN: 0-316-34080-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2001
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
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
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