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
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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