There’s less to this story than meets the eye.
Texas newsman McVicker unconvincingly attempts to paint con man and prison escape artist Steven Russell as an engaging rogue.
Currently serving 45 years for embezzling $800,000, plus another 99 years for his four breakouts from various Texas jails, Russell is impressively bold, but not exactly the master of “flamboyant, nonviolent brilliance” that McVicker depicts. Most of his escapes speak volumes more about the mind-boggling ineptitude of prison security than they do about the brilliance of Russell: for one, he dyed some prison whites with Magic Markers to impersonate a doctor; in another, he spent months faking a last-stage case of AIDS to get transferred to a nursing home (the jailhouse doctors never bothered to do a blood test); in a third, he changed clothes and convincingly played with a walkie-talkie to walk right out the front door. He was determined, but little more. Russell's criminal activities also fail to justify McVicker's fascination. If he’d been the genius the author thinks, he wouldn’t have kept getting caught for passport fraud, embezzlement, bid-rigging, insurance fraud, and felony theft. Sure, he displayed even greater determination and persistence as a crook than as an escape artist, but he wasn’t very successful as either. His love for fellow thief Phillip Morris is hardly the stuff of great romance; often enough, Morris wants to be rid of Russell, who once got him thrown in jail for a crime he had nothing to do with. (There's love for you.) Russell is no picaresque, and his escapes have netted him exactly nothing except a long stay in solitary confinement at considerable taxpayer expense. At least he’s remained true to his code of making others pay his way through life.
There’s less to this story than meets the eye.Pub Date: July 2, 2003
ISBN: 0-7868-6903-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003
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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