A classic, seamy portrait of widespread moral turpitude, conveyed with crackling Boston-Irish sarcasm.
Boston Herald reporter Carr tracks a pair of Beantown siblings along a twisted trail of extortion, graft, murder and other crimes that overran even the FBI.
Making it clear that he will not be unduly obsessed with journalistic objectivity here, the author describes his behavior during Billy Bulger’s testimony at a 2003 congressional hearing: “In full view of the CSPAN camera, I periodically grimaced, made faces, stuck out my tongue, rolled my eyes, and grabbed my throat when I thought Billy was being less than forthcoming.” Carr goes on to document that Billy’s reputation as “the good brother” was as misleading as his congressional testimony. He follows Billy’s ascent from Boston’s notorious Southie neighborhood (which he served in the Massachusetts House of Representatives to his eventual presidency at the University of Massachusetts. Big brother Whitey Bulger was in Carr’s estimation a fulltime, nonpareil crook, possibly the model for the hit man in George V. Higgins’s celebrated Boston crime novel, The Friends of Eddie Coyle. For nearly three decades, the author contends, Billy worked inside the system while Whitey worked outside the law; the crux of Carr’s thesis is that they cooperated in buying and corrupting whomever they could not intimidate or, in Whitey’s case, permanently remove. Among those bought, the author asserts, was FBI agent Zip Connolly, another Southie boy; it was a congressional investigation of corruption in the Boston office of the FBI that finally cost Billy his job at UMass. Billy’s eventual disgrace tainted an associated host of Boston political hacks and bureaucrats, but he still draws a state pension; Whitey remains at large, reportedly sighted in locales as disparate as Thailand and Portugal.
A classic, seamy portrait of widespread moral turpitude, conveyed with crackling Boston-Irish sarcasm.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2006
ISBN: 0-446-57651-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2005
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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