Readers might wonder why King’s account suddenly surfaces 31 years after the killings, but true-crime fans and Manson...
An oddly timed, incredibly detailed account of the most famous of the Manson Family’s victims.
Throughout the summer of 1969, America was transfixed by a series of brutal murders in and around Los Angeles. The victims ranged from an anonymous, well-to-do couple to an heiress to the pregnant wife of director Roman Polanski, Sharon Tate. Exhibiting an almost voyeuristic passion for his topic, King (The Duchess of Windsor, 1999) unearths a staggering trove of information on Tate, an actress who died at 26 with barely a handful of films and television appearances to her credit. Beyond limning Tate’s short life, King takes readers into the midst of the Manson “family,” profiling her killers’ pasts, the sex and drugs rites of the Manson family, and the career of Manson himself (the criminal and failed pop idol who was convicted of compelling them to murder). Making extensive use of seldom-seen material (including police and detective reports, photographs of the murder scene, Manson family-member parole trial transcripts, and interviews with principal and secondary characters like Tate’s mother, Doris, and surviving relatives of other Manson family victims), King unflinchingly recreates the brutality and utter randomness of the events of early August 1969. Beyond the sensational reportage (including a harrowing and grisly, minute-by-minute account of the murders of Tate and the four others at 10050 Cielo Drive), King reveals the condition and whereabouts of Manson family members while including some lucid and trenchant observations on the continuing cult of Manson (e.g., the merchandising of Manson’s image). King also details the victims’-rights advocacy work of Tate’s mother and sister.
Readers might wonder why King’s account suddenly surfaces 31 years after the killings, but true-crime fans and Manson fetishists (you know who you are) will find it irresistible.Pub Date: June 15, 2000
ISBN: 1-56980-157-6
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Barricade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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