A savage, unrelenting tale.
A spellbinding narrative of drugs, death and debauchery as told by one of America's most notorious criminals.
Cocaine trafficker Roberts and Vanity Fair contributor Wright (Hella Nation: Looking for Happy Meals in Kandahar, Rocking the Side Pipe, Wingnut's War Against the GAP, and Other Adventures with the Totally Lost Tribes of America, 2009, etc.) team up to recount Roberts' unflinchingly brutal coming-of-age amid the crime-soaked underworld of New York City and beyond. Yet to call Roberts just a cocaine trafficker hardly does the man justice. He was a hustler on every front—from his humble beginnings ripping off drug deals to his ascent to the highest level of drug kingpins. Told primarily through Roberts' firsthand account (as well as the occasional insertion by Wright and Roberts' associates), the book reads like a how-to guide for criminals: "My father was careful not to hit people in the face who owed him money…you might kill him, and then you won't collect your money.” Equally disconcerting are Roberts' tips on disposing of a body, noting that the trick is to separate the guts from the rest when dumping a corpse into the ocean: “The reason bodies float is because the juices inside the guts make gases.” After being charged with kidnapping early in his criminal career, Roberts joined the army and served in Vietnam in an effort to avoid prison time. In the jungles of Southeast Asia, Roberts' insatiable bloodlust began to flourish; he describes one instance in which a VC soldier was skinned alive, noting simply, "Our amusement was finding new ways to make the bad ones suffer.” The author recounts his brutal crimes against man and morality in an off-handed manner, confirming Roberts' assertion, "I don't have a conscience"—an assessment with which readers will likely to agree.
A savage, unrelenting tale.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-45042-5
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2011
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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