The Robin Hood mantle draped over Pablo is a bit much, but his exploits will keep readers agog.
Pablo Escobar's brother and business partner recalls the Colombian drug lord’s outsized life and death.
Roberto tells Pablo’s story with a cool reserve. He makes no excuses for his brother’s crimes, but he wants readers to have a more rounded picture. In Roberto’s view, Pablo was not all bad. He was loyal, he was a family man and he had a streak of generosity to match his violence. Growing up poor, he soon discovered a knack for smuggling. The contraband was cigarettes at first, but he was in the right place at the right time to take advantage of the cocaine boom, much of it fueled by U.S. users. It was purely a business decision, made without remorse: Cocaine was easier to smuggle than washing machines (another of Pablo’s specialties) and provided a much greater profit. The amounts of money involved were ludicrous; it was so difficult to find good hiding spots for tens of millions in cash that about ten percent was lost to water damage and rats. Pablo used submarines for his smuggling operations and had so many members of the army, police and state bureaucracy on his payroll that he rivaled the government as an employer. Yet the consequences of his trade were death and destruction, which rain down on almost every page of this memoir. Jaw-dropping events abound. Leftist guerrillas took over the Palace of Justice at Pablo’s request to seize papers that threatened his extradition to the United States. He built his own prison with the government’s assent and dispensed colossal sums to the impoverished and needy. “In Colombia,” Roberto explains, “poor people have always tried to help each other.” Pablo wasn't exactly underprivileged by the time he was dispensing alms, and the eerily detached way he gave execution orders doesn't buttress his brother's case for his charitable side. Nonetheless, his life makes for a grim, ensnaring tale.
The Robin Hood mantle draped over Pablo is a bit much, but his exploits will keep readers agog.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-17892-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2009
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
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
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