Six-shooter justice in a Golden Gate setting. Attorney Boessenecker (Badge and Buckshot: Lawlessness in Old California, 1988) complains that California lawmen are largely unknown outside California because moviemakers located the Wild West in places like Wyoming and Texas. There's no doubt that Harry Morse's exploits could fuel a screenplay or two; as a lawman in Alameda County, just across the bay from San Francisco, Morse had his share of facedowns, shoot-'em-ups, and dry- gulchings. Boessenecker chronicles Morse's life and times, drawing heavily on the lawman's carefully self-serving, sometimes published accounts, which are invariably more interestingly written than his biographer's. Fans of law-enforcement history will enjoy reading about Morse's single-handedly busting up rings of savage desperadoes and ill-tempered banditos, who seemed to be legion in Alameda; some of the details of mass murders and gang killings could be taken from today's headlines. Boessenecker does a good job of separating invention from reality, and he's combed the archives to provide details about the usually forgotten bad guys. He's also careful to maintain that Morse was less racist than the run of Anglo California cops of the time; although Morse usually referred to the Hispanic citizens of Alameda as ``greasers,'' Boessenecker notes that Morse's intervention helped acquit a Mexican-American falsely accused of murder, and that he employed many Mexican-Americans as deputies. That some-of-my-best-friends defense aside, Boessenecker is content to regale his readers with tales of murder and mayhem, the best among them his account of Black Bart, the gentleman-poet stagecoach robber whose intriguing life would make just the movie the author calls for. A modestly interesting addition to the library of Old West lawmen. (55 b&w photos, 3 drawings, 2 maps, not seen)
Pub Date: March 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8061-3011-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Univ. of Oklahoma
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1998
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
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
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