A pleasure for true-crime buffs and a better read than Jeff Guinn’s Go Down Together (2009)—though Guinn breaks more news.
Fast-paced account of the fast-lived lives of Mr. Barrow and Ms. Parker.
In Arthur Penn’s 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde, Faye Dunaway was a fine fit for Bonnie, who, said one eyewitness, “could turn heads.” Schneider (Brutal Journey: The Epic Story of the First Crossing of North America, 2006, etc.) is inclined to a touch more noirish poetry, describing the young Dallas waitress as looking “like a piece of candy…dressed in a funny uniform with enormous lapels, like some cross between a French maid and Raggedy Anne, and she’s barely taller than the big brass cash register on the counter.” But Warren Beatty? Well, Clyde Barrow wasn’t the king stud of the Texas bad guys—that honor went to a contemporary aptly named “Dapper Dan”—but rather a thin drink of water, albeit with a very bad attitude and a solid record of standing tall before judges. Schneider takes some risk in attempting to put himself into the heads of Bonnie, Clyde and assorted criminals and lawmen. But, as he points out in a note on sources, the story has been well covered before by numerous contemporaries of the Depression-era dastardly duo, so that there are plenty of primary sources to back up his claims. Schneider does a righteous job of understanding Bonnie and Clyde, and if they’re not wholly sympathetic—they did kill folks, after all—they’re not wholly monstrous either. Thanks to Penn’s film, there are plenty of people who have some sense of how they lived and died—spectacularly, and without much regard for the messes they left behind. Schneider shows how oddly accurate the film got at least those final moments, all rat-a-tat machine guns and chirping cicadas.
A pleasure for true-crime buffs and a better read than Jeff Guinn’s Go Down Together (2009)—though Guinn breaks more news.Pub Date: May 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-8050-8672-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: John Macrae/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
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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