Masterful research, although some material appears to function as a story-stretcher.
A popular true-crime writer offers his fifth in a chilling series on serial killers.
Schechter has written about familiar murderers like Ed Gein (Deviant, 1998) and H.H. Holmes (Depraved, 1996), but this time he focuses on a deformed 14-year-old killer whose rampage shocked 19th-century Boston. Jesse Harding Pomeroy was arrested in 1874 for the brutal murder of a four-year-old boy and was quickly nicknamed “The Boston Boy Fiend.” His sadistic career had begun three years earlier with the sexual torture of several younger boys. Five of his victims identified him from his oversized head and his milky right eye: he ended up sentenced to six years in reform school (where he thrilled to the punitive beatings of other boys). A born psychopath, he played the system and got out early. His next act was to kill a young girl who came into his mother’s store, followed by the child who ended his string of crimes. Schechter introduces the story with an informative overview of various periods in history—including the 1990s—where child killers raised a social alarm. He also notes that Pomeroy made a Lecteresque cameo in Caleb Carr’s novel The Alienist. More compelling is Schechter’s reconstruction of the sensation-hungry times: he offers newspaper clips, accounts of other crimes, clashing diagnoses from forensic alienists, and bizarre social theories such as the concern that lurid dime novels created such monsters. Pomeroy, who wrote a self-serving autobiography, received a controversial death sentence that was later commuted to life in solitary. His persistent attempts to escape surprised everyone and kept him in the Boston papers for the next 50 years.
Masterful research, although some material appears to function as a story-stretcher.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-671-01448-X
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2000
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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