A less-than-compelling reinvestigation of a 1932 Arizona crime in which two bodies were dismembered, stuffed into luggage, and taken by rail out of state. Arizona journalist Bommersbach's ten-year investigation has not revealed definitively the perpetrator, motive, or dismemberer in the crime. Winnie Ruth Judd, the author tells us, was married to a physician 25 years her senior. She was sojourning in Phoenix with two young, pretty roommates while her husband—unemployable because of his drug addiction—searched for work in L.A. Phoenix in the 30's was strait-laced, but, even so, there was a subculture of ``cops, attorneys, playboys, and party girls.'' Enter J.J. ``Happy Jack'' Halloran, a successful Phoenix businessman who loved to take a couple of bottles and friends over to the ``girls'' and party. Unfortunately, this is all Bommersbach tells of Halloran, a central character. The other principals are paper-thin as well, except for Judd, who's depicted as so saintly that she seems subject to ascension at any moment. One night, Judd took two heavy trunks on the train to L.A., where she was asked to open them. Inside were one roommate and pieces of another. Judd was returned to Phoenix, where she told of being attacked by her roommates and of fighting for her life. At Judd's trial for murder, Bommersbach explains, the police concealed that fact that Happy Jack was with Judd that night; that she had a gunshot wound in her left hand and 147 bruises on her body (indicating self-defense); and that, in the coroner's opinion, only a surgeon (perhaps hired by Happy Jack?) could have cut up the bodies so precisely. Found guilty, Judd was sent to a state hospital, where she spent 38 years; she is now free. Fine if inconclusive research, but more properly melodrama than true crime. An NBC miniseries based on the book will air in November. (Photos—eight pp. b&w—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-671-74007-5
Page Count: 284
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1992
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
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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