A bristling, harrowing journey into the life of a stalker and his unsuspecting victims.
A woman who grew up under the tutelage of a predatory child molester shares her story.
As a youth in Manhattan, Weiss (My Mom, Style Icon, 2011) was a tennis hopeful at “one of the top private schools in the country.” Her memoir, a lyrically crafted yet unsettling affair, opens on a bus, with her and her classmates on their way to tennis lessons. She learned about Gary Wilensky, an in-demand private coach who became popular with many other girls at the school. The book’s framework is culled from police reports, articles, interviews, personal field research, and Wilensky’s own words, transcribed from documents. Through this dogged research, Weiss charts Wilensky’s early life and his sketchy employment history and then moves into his private life, which became increasingly disturbing and sinister, ultimately revealing the shrouded world of a sexual obsessive who preyed on vulnerable, unassuming young girls. Running alongside this narrative is the story of the author’s privileged upbringing and adolescent experiences, which paint a multitonal portrait of a girl in flux with schoolwork, insecurities, desires to succeed and discover herself, all while blissfully unaware of the predatory deviant lurking beneath the facade of a goofy middle-aged tennis coach who was cool with all the kids. By the time the author had her first tennis lessons with “Grandpa Gary” in the early 1990s, he had already amassed a group of favorite girls to whom he’d send valentines and divulge intimate secrets. Wilensky also began fully furnishing a remote cabin hideaway with bondage and torture equipment and surveillance technology. Was Weiss his next victim? No one will ever know; Wilensky killed himself after the failed kidnapping attempt of a mother and daughter he’d been stalking. Weiss has crafted a dark and brooding yet brisk and eloquently written memoir, and her vivid coming-of-age narration shines a spotlight on the precarious relationship between teenagers and adults and everything that can go awry in between.
A bristling, harrowing journey into the life of a stalker and his unsuspecting victims.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-245657-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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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