A meticulous but flat case is made here for a wrongful first- degree murder conviction. On her 21st birthday, in 1979, Laurencia ``Bambi'' Bembenek entered the Milwaukee police academy. Thus began the chain of events that, according to Radish (Journalism/Univ. of Wisconsin- Milwaukee), ended with Bembenek being framed for murder and receiving a life sentence. Dismissed from the force in her first year, Bembenek filed a discrimination suit against the MPD and married a detective—Elfred Schultz—after a two-month courtship. Soon, she began to suspect Schultz of continuing a relationship with his first wife, Christine—despite the detective's apparent bitter obsession with his having to pay the mortgage on the house that Christine now lived in without him. Within five months of Schultz's marriage to Bembenek, a disguised intruder murdered Christine with a single gunshot while she slept. Although Schultz had means (his off-duty gun was determined to be the murder weapon); motivation (he claimed that alimony and tax support were ruining him); and access (a key to the house), Bembenek was charged and convicted of Christine's murder. Radish details the incompetent defense Bembenek was given by an acquisitive (and later disbarred) attorney. After Bembenek's conviction, many came forth to protest, including a private detective who, working without pay for five years, unearthed evidence of an MPD cover-up. To date, however, Bembenek has been unable to receive a new trial. In 1990, she escaped to Canada, where (although imprisoned) she is petitioning for refugee status from the US. Paper-thin characterizations and minimal backgrounds dull Radish's narrative. Still, the author excels at factual accounts, and this could be grist for a TV movie. (Sixteen pages of photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: March 1, 1992
ISBN: 1-55972-103-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Birch Lane Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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