Are the scales of justice at work here? Hardly. But Dunne’s courtroom tales are a lot more lucid than most judge’s...
Surging reports on high-society murder cases, featuring some of the most seamy and venal behavior this side of Gomorrah, from the man who wrote the book on such doings, Dunne (The Way We Lived Then, 1999, etc.)
Collected here are Dunne’s articles from Vanity Fair on high-profile courtroom dramas involving O.J. Simpson, Erik and Lyle Menendez, Claus von Bülow, the murder of Martha Moxley in Greenwich, Connecticut—nine stories in all, including a lacerating piece on the murder of his daughter, Dominique. Making no pretense at balance (Dunne is nothing if not opinionated and a great deal of the effectiveness of this work revolves around that), the author is scrupulously honest in his reporting, and thorough. He also moves at a good clip, pulling readers along as though a hand had clasped their sleeve, pointing out inconsistencies in testimony and the willful corruption of the truth by shady lawyers. O.J. gets the most pages: “The Simpson case is like a great trash novel come to life, a mammoth fireworks display of interracial marriage, love, lust, lies, hate, fame, wealth, beauty, obsession, spousal abuse, stalking, brokenhearted children, the bloodiest of bloody knife-slashing homicides, and all the justice that money can buy.” Dunne has a knack for capturing the air of unreality that bathes these trials, but the crimes themselves are simply grisly: “The porno star and the unemployed dishwasher implicated each other in helping Murillo as he held a pillow over her face to muffle her screams. It had taken the three of them 15 minutes to kill her.” Dunne also has a way with delivering a dig—“A man just convicted of twice attempting to murder his wife would not seem like much of a catch to most women”—although he can also be prim: a particular judge, for example, was “noticeably dressed in a manner associated more with Hollywood agents than with superior court judges.”
Are the scales of justice at work here? Hardly. But Dunne’s courtroom tales are a lot more lucid than most judge’s instructions to their juries.Pub Date: July 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60873-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
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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