A story of establishment and judicial misconduct that’s no longer pertinent—or even interesting.
Preston (The Dig, 2016, etc.) revisits the 1970s scandal involving Jeremy Thorpe, Member of Parliament for North Devon and leader of Britain’s Liberal Party.
In what could be a juicy, salacious tale, the author chronicles what seems to have been a brief encounter dragged out over more than 20 years in the paranoid mind of the Parliamentarian and his pathetic victim. Thorpe met Norman Josiffe, a confused, mentally unstable young man, at Thorpe’s “friend’s” home, where Josiffe was working in the stables. Thorpe gave him his card and an invitation to turn to him if he ever had “problems with Van”—Brecht Van de Vater, Josiffe’s employer. Soon, Norman went to Thorpe intending to return a collection of insurance letters Van de Vater had saved. For their first meeting, in 1961, Thorpe invited Josiffe to stay with him at his mother’s house, where they began a short-lived affair. Josiffe’s life comes across as a mess of mental institutions, prescription drug addiction, and constant attempts to recover his National Insurance health card. In England, employers pay the premium for the card; in Josiffe’s case, responsibility lay first with Van de Vater and then Thorpe. Neither of them bothered to pay, and Josiffe’s fragile mind and desperate economic situation drove him to desperation. Enter Thorpe’s MP colleague, Peter Bessell, who stepped in to protect Thorpe by paying small sums to Josiffe. In Parliament, there is an unwritten law that a man’s private life is his own business. Thus, Josiffe’s accusations were swept under the table by everyone. Thorpe and Bessell, desperate for money for the party and themselves, found a savior in Jack Hayward, a Bahamas-based millionaire who provided them with cash. Still, Thorpe’s paranoia about Josiffe grew, and he proposed a murder plot. It was an absurd plan, but apparently not absurd enough to throw the affair into the news and the courts. Indeed, many readers may wonder why it’s necessary to revisit the whole episode now.
A story of establishment and judicial misconduct that’s no longer pertinent—or even interesting.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59051-814-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
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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