There is a reason why true crime sells, of course, especially when it involves famous people: A blend of gore, fame, and...
The rapid-fire tale of one of the most infamous true-crime stories of the past decade.
As Patterson (The People vs. Alex Cross, 2017, etc.) and Abramovich (Bullies: A Friendship, 2016) demonstrate early on, Aaron Hernandez (1989-2017) appeared to have it all. A football star in Connecticut, he was recruited to play at the University of Florida, where he was a standout tight end. Although there were a few whispers of behavioral issues when he was in Gainesville that led to him dropping in the NFL draft, Hernandez was drafted by the New England Patriots. His trajectory continued to rise in the NFL, where he made the Pro Bowl and eventually earned a contract extension worth $40 million. Then it all went awry. In 2015, Hernandez was convicted of the 2013 murder of his fiancee’s sister’s boyfriend and later put on trial—though acquitted—for a double murder in Boston that happened before the murder for which he was convicted (and which the authors clearly believe he committed). The handsome and charming but volatile football star was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole; in 2017, he was found dead in his cell of an apparent suicide. As can be expected in any book with Patterson’s name on the cover, the authors tell the Hernandez tale in page-churning fashion. The book, just over 380 pages of text, contains 97 chapters as well as a prologue, coda, and epilogue, virtually none more than five pages long, most three or four. This approach will undoubtedly keep readers moving, but it also leaves little room for depth and nuance. The book also lacks footnotes, endnotes, a bibliography, or any other sourcing.
There is a reason why true crime sells, of course, especially when it involves famous people: A blend of gore, fame, and voyeurism is a compelling mixture in our violent, fame-obsessed society. There is also a reason why the genre has a reputation for gratuitousness. A middling true-crime saga that fails to answer a significant question: Why?Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-41265-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2018
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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