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Summary
Summary
From award-winning journalist David Kushner, a regular contributor to Rolling Stone , The New Yorker , Vanity Fair , and other premier magazines, Alligator Candy is a reported memoir about family, survival, and the unwavering power of love.
David Kushner grew up in the early 1970s in the Florida suburbs. It was when kids still ran free, riding bikes and disappearing into the nearby woods for hours at a time. One morning in 1973, however, everything changed. David's older brother Jon biked through the forest to the convenience store for candy, and never returned.
Every life has a defining moment, a single act that charts the course we take and determines who we become. For Kushner, it was Jon's disappearance--a tragedy that shocked his family and the community at large. Decades later, now a grown man with kids of his own, Kushner found himself unsatisfied with his own memories and decided to revisit the episode a different way: through the eyes of a reporter. His investigation brought him back to the places and people he once knew and slowly made him realize just how much his past had affected his present. After sifting through hundreds of documents and reports, conducting dozens of interviews, and poring over numerous firsthand accounts, he has produced a powerful and inspiring story of loss, perseverance, and memory. Alligator Candy is searing and unforgettable.
Author Notes
A contributing editor of Rolling Stone , David Kushner also writes for publications including The New Yorker , Vanity Fair , Wired , The New York Times Magazine , New York , GQ , and Esquire . Kushner served as the digital culture commentator for National Public Radio's Weekend Edition Sunday , and has taught journalism at Princeton University and New York University. He has been featured in The Best Business Writing , The Best American Crime Reporting , and The Best Travel Writing , and his ebook The Bones of Marianna: A Reform School, a Terrible Secret, and a Hundred-Year Fight for Justice . His books include The Players Ball ; Alligator Candy: A Memoir (an NPR Best Book of the Year); Jacked: The Outlaw Story of Grand Theft Auto ; Levittown: Two Families, One Tycoon, and the Fight for Civil Rights in America's Legendary Suburb ; Jonny Magic and the Card Shark Kids: How a Gang of Geeks Beat the Odds and Stormed Las Vegas ; and Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this solemn memoir, journalist Kushner returns to the horrifying murder of his brother in Tampa in 1973. Kushner, only four years old at the time, begged 11-year-old Jonathan to get him candy at the local 7-Eleven and then watched him cycle away into the woods. Jonathan never returned, and his disappearance led to an extraordinary search that apprehended the murderers, two psychopaths who had been stalking children in the area. One of the killers was executed; when the second became eligible for parole, Kushner felt compelled to research and confront the tragedy that he had avoided for so long. The strength of Kushner's narrative lies in his exploration of how trauma distorts and reshapes even the strongest families. In the wake of Jonathan's murder, Kushner's father, a progressive anthropology professor, shifted his research to focus on grief and loss, while his mother helped pioneer hospice care. Yet the family members rarely shared their feelings, and Kushner couldn't bring himself to write about the murder until after his father's death. Kushner's effort to grapple with his loss takes far more space than the actual investigation, and at times, the narrative is unfocused and confusing. Nevertheless, his vivid evocation of his brother, his family, and their Jewish, academic, Southern milieu is a moving tribute. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In this thoroughly reported, masterfully written memoir about a gruesome 1973 murder, veteran journalist Kushner (Levittown, 2009) retraces the aftermath of his brother's bike ride to and from a Florida 7-Eleven, sparing no horrific details. The title of the tale comes from the Snappy Gator Gum that Jon, 11, bought there for the author, then four, but never got to deliver. Instead, one of the two killers gave it to his own son. Kushner puts the brutal attack into context, explaining what it meant to his family, his community, even the country. Though he mainly focuses on his sibling's story, he also explains how the senseless attack by two sick men who wanted to hunt people (as one confessed to his wife, who turned him in to police) contributed to a national loss of innocence. At the time, parents thought nothing of letting their children pedal through woods on their own. Not today. Now a dad himself, he shares his feelings of guilt and what-ifs. The most painful one may be, Perhaps if I hadn't asked Jon for the alligator candy, he would never have gone that day, and he would still be alive. In the end, Kushner imagines his brother telling him it's not his fault. A tragic, haunting story.--Springen, Karen Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
GHETTO: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea, by Mitchell Duneier. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $16.) In contemporary usage, the term "ghetto," freighted with innuendo and negative connotations, has become divorced from its historical context. The idea of a ghetto began in 1500s Venice, when the city relegated its Jews to an island; Rome and other cities in Western Europe followed suit. Duneier traces the way in which comparable forces pushed blacks to the margins in America. THE NIX, by Nathan Hill. (Vintage, $17.) Fringe politics and globecrossing capers figure into this dizzying debut novel. A young English professor with a deadend book project writes instead about his mother, a former leftist radical who abandoned him as a child. Our reviewer, Teddy Wayne, praised Hill's story as "a supersize and audacious novel of American misadventure." ALLIGATOR CANDY: A Memoir, by David Kushner. (Simon & Schuster, $16.) In 1973, when the author was 4, his older brother Jonathan was abducted and murdered; the crime rattled his Florida hometown, and a profound silence settled in his home. Years later, Kushner approached his brother's death as a reporter, digging into news clips and other records to find out more; along with his emotional account of the event itself, he offers a glimpse of the crisis wrought by grief. THE ASSISTANTS, by Camille Perri. (Putnam, $16.) Tina, the assistant to a high-powered media executive in New York, is straining under meager pay and unpaid bills. When the opportunity arises to embezzle the amount needed to pay offher student loan balance - a sum that would pale next to her boss's own spending - she takes it. But when another assistant discovers the fraud, she blackmails Tina into committing the same crime to help her pay offher own debt. DIANE ARBUS: Portrait of a Photographer, by Arthur Lubow. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $17.99.) Drawing on interviews with Arbus's friends and lovers, correspondence and diary entries, Lubow's account of the troubled artist reads like a novel. He chronicles her relatively short career, including the lurid gossip - incest, sexual escapades, mental illness - that swirled around her, while giving her own voice a prominent role in the biography. SHELTER, by Jung Yun. (Picador, $16.) Kyung, a Korean-American, grew up financially comfortable - surrounded by tutors, music lessons and other markers of success - but in loveless, unaffectionate surroundings. Years later, he is struggling to keep his middle-class home when an act of violence leaves his parents, from whom he is largely estranged, unable to remain on their own.
School Library Journal Review
On October 28, 1973, 11-year-old Jonathan Kushner hopped on his bike and took off for the 7-Eleven. Jon's four-year-old brother, David, stood on the sidewalk and watched him peddle away. It's a small detail that might have been lost in years of subsequent day, except that this was the last time that David saw Jon alive. Over the years, the questions that haunt him stem from this moment: Could David have changed Jon's mind? If David hadn't begged his brother to buy him a toy, would Jon have gone? Readers experience the sequence of events through the perspective of David as a child: Jon's bike found off the path, Jon's body in the trunk of a car, Jon's funeral. Kids at school said that the killers had pickled Jon's body and put it in a jar. David's father said that David was inside when Jon left and could not have been the last one to see him. What really happened? At 13, David started furtively hunting through the library's microfilmed newspaper articles, searching for information about Jon's death. Teens will relate both to David's need to uncover the truth and his desire to protect his parents from what he discovers. The crime is always presented from David's intensely personal perspective, and his sense of horror is excruciatingly amplified as he realizes that his parents have known the disturbing details all along. More than 40 years later, Kushner, now an acclaimed author and journalist, is ready to tell the story. VERDICT Teens looking for graphic details would do better with titles such as Vincent Bugliosi's Helter Skelter. But those seeking to understand how life continues after a grave loss will love Kushner's eloquent words and personal viewpoint.-Diane Colson, Gainesville City College, FL © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
The story of how the author and his family dealt with the senseless murder of his older brother. In 1973, 4-year-old Kushner (Journalism/Princeton Univ.; The Bones of Marianna: A Reform School, a Terrible Secret, and a Hundred-Year Fight for Justice, 2013, etc.), a contributing editor of Rolling Stone, was living with his parents and two brothers in a Tampa suburb where children roved freely and without fear. But then, Kushner's 11-year-old brother Jon disappeared while on an errand to buy candy for his youngest brother. The family didn't learn what happened until after police investigators found his brutalized body buried in a shallow grave. In thinking about the incident as an adult, Kushner realized that he barely remembered Jon and that the details others gave him about the death "didn't stick." However, it was clear to him even as a child that both his parents and his oldest brother, Andy, understood the horror of what had happened and grieved over the loss profoundly. Eventually, the family settled into an outwardly new, but inwardly damaged, normal while Kushner and Andy acclimated themselves to being two brothers instead of three. Yet the author and his family never forgot Jon, who haunted them all. More than 20 years after Jon's murder, the family discovered that one of the men convicted of killing Jon was scheduled for a parole hearing. Kushner began an in-depth investigation of Jon's murder, episodes of which he would not be able to piece together in narrative form after his father's death in 2010. Much as the author desired closure, he realized it was a fantasy; what he sought instead was to understand how the grief he and his family suffered was "present and evolving" and how it had shaped them into the people they became. Kushner's moving book is not only a memorial to a brother tragically deprived of his right to live; it is also a meditation on the courage necessary to live freely in a world riven by pain, suffering, and evil. A probing, poignant memoir about tragedy, grief, and trying to cope. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
One of the takeaways from this book by Kushner (contributing editor, Rolling Stone; Ferris Professor of Journalism, Princeton Univ.; Masters of Doom) is that loss cannot be avoided-it stays with a person for however long they need it to, but it can also provide insight into one's approach to life. When the author was four years old, his older brother, Jon, was kidnapped and murdered near their house in Florida. This memoir describes Kushner's experience after that defining moment, and the ways in which, looking back, he sees how events later were linked to that dark day. His writing effectively moves the reader to feel a range of emotions along with his family as they wait during the days Jon is missing, hear the news of his death, learn about the killers, and carry on in their own lives. It is heart-wrenching but also shows how families unite and continue forward with the memories of a loved one. -VERDICT This emotional account invites readers to journey down a path that at first is in the shade but eventually wanders through strands of sunlight. You will hold those close to you tight after reading. For fans of true crime, books about getting past tragedy, and memoirs.-Ryan Claringbole, Wisconsin Dept. of Pub. Instruction, Madison © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Alligator Candy 1 MY LAST MEMORY of my brother Jon was my most suspect. It was October 28, 1973, and we were on the sidewalk outside our house. I was a stocky four-year-old with a brown bowl haircut, and Jon, wiry and lean with wavy red hair, was eleven. Earlier that year, we'd moved to this small ranch house with a red Spanish-style roof in Tampa, Florida. It was the northern edge of the burgeoning suburbs, a new home on the newest street by the woods. For the kids in the neighborhood, the woods represented the great unknown, a thicket of freedom, a mossy maze of cypress and palms begging to be explored. Kids ventured into there on horseback, barefoot, on bikes. They had worn a path to the 7-Eleven convenience store across the woods, and that's where Jon was heading this day. Jon straddled his red bicycle, aiming for the trees. These were the Easy Rider years, and boys' bikes were designed to resemble motorcycles, the kinds we'd see driven around town by Hells Angels. Jon's bike had a long red banana-shaped seat, shiny chrome upright handlebars, and fat tires. For added effect, kids would tape a playing card in the back spokes to sound like a motorcycle when the tire spun. They'd lower their heads, extend their arms, and hunch their backs as they pedaled, visions of Evel Knievel in their minds. My parents had given Jon a green ten-speed Schwinn for his birthday in September, but for some reason he decided to ride his old one this morning. Maybe he wanted something more rugged for the woods or just wanted to take one more spin on his old bike before retiring it. He wore a brown muscle shirt and cutoff blue jean shorts embroidered with a patch from his day camp, Camp Keystone. His sneakers were red, white, and blue Hush Puppies. I could tell by the way his feet bobbed on the pedals that he was anxious to leave. "You're going to forget," I told him. "I'm not," he replied. "I know you are." "I won't." "Let me go with you." "You can't. You're too young." I wanted something specific from the store: Snappy Gator Gum. It wasn't just gum, it was a toy. The gum came packed in the mouth of a plastic alligator head that opened and closed when you squeezed the neck. I had to have it and didn't want anything to get in the way. "What if it rains?" I asked Jon. I was thinking about an afternoon at our last house, when Jon had biked to a store shortly before a torrential Florida downpour. I remembered standing next to my mom in the kitchen when Jon called, and my mom telling me that we had to go pick him up in the station wagon because he was, as she said, "caught in the rain." I hadn't heard that phrase before, and it struck me as strange. I pictured Jon literally caught in the rain, stuck in suspended animation, hovering in a cage of falling drops. "If it rains I'll call," he promised. "Call me anyway when you get there," I said, "so I can remind you what I want." "Fine." Jon grabbed the handlebars and pedaled quickly down the sidewalk toward the woods. I watched him ride off, still wishing I could go along. I never saw him again. It would take decades to unravel what happened. But my search would always lead me back to this spot. Excerpted from Alligator Candy: A Memoir by David Kushner All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.