The television talk shows are no doubt salivating over Confessions of a Master Jewel Thief by Bill Mason with Lee Gruenfeld (Villard Books, $24.95, 362 pages): A successful cat burglar — his heists from celebrities yielded jewels worth $35 million — tells all.
A clever fellow who liked taking locks apart, Bill Mason trained like an athlete to climb ropes hand over hand and dressed like a gentleman to waltz through security doors behind chattering party-goers. He claims to be done with all that now. Don’t bank on it.
Here’s what you’ll learn from this book:
1. An apartment at the top of a tall building provides no particular challenge to a clever thief, who can easily enter from the roof down or break through a wall from an adjoining apartment. (The city directory was the main source of Mr. Mason’s information about his targets. He spent months planning some “scores,” and always let the phone ring 10 times before entering.)
2. The more elaborate the security system, the more careless the residents are about keeping doors and windows locked — and anyway, a smart thief has no trouble getting keys to any apartment he wants to enter by writing on good letterhead to Schlage or another lock maker and politely requesting replacements (Mr. Mason was a real estate manager).
3. At no time of day or night are targets safe from cat burglars. A thief who has studied his target’s routines will know when the lady of the house has retrieved her jewels from the safe and laid them out for the evening before leaving for the hairdresser.
4. Most women keep their jewels in a box on top of their bureaus, or in the top drawer, or in a locked wardrobe, which to a thief says “Here they are.” Mr. Mason says he spent no more than five minutes inside targeted locations, so he advises leaving some trinkets on top of your bureau while hiding the real stuff elsewhere — and keeping serious stones in the safe until the moment you’re ready to wear them.
Mr. Mason is obviously a man of intelligence and daring, but he’s so busy congratulating himself on not carrying a weapon or physically harming his victims that he demonstrates no understanding of the wreck he has made of a promising life.
Unfortunately, his editor was so charmed by him that she didn’t begin to clean up his profanity, particularly in his pages-long diatribe against the effrontery of the police in charging him with some crimes he hadn’t committed while missing some details of crimes he had.
Don’t buy this book, but keep your doors locked, hide your jewels, and report to security that cheerful, well-dressed man with a clipboard wandering down your hall.
• • •
In the words of Kansas editor William Allen White, President William McKinley “walked among men a bronze statue, for thirty years determinedly looking for his pedestal.” According to House Speaker Joe Cannon, McKinley kept his ear so close to the ground “that he gets it full of grasshoppers.”
H. Wayne Morgan’s William McKinley and His America (Kent State University Press, $65, 406 pages) is an expanded version of Mr. Morgan’s earlier biography. Here as before, the author offers a detailed, if wooden, narrative of his subject’s career.
In 1896, McKinley — managed by the astute Mark Hanna — won the Republican presidential nomination on the first ballot. In the campaign that followed, McKinley stood up for the interests of American business and narrowly defeated a Democratic ticket led by the charismatic William Jennings Bryan.
Then as now, money talked. Hanna solicited and obtained great contributions from the robber barons of the day, most notably from oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller.
The war with Spain in 1898, to which McKinley reluctantly consented, saw the emergence of the United States as a world power. There need not have been a war, for Spain agreed to virtually everything asked of it in the crisis that followed the sinking of the battleship Maine. But popular opinion was for war, and McKinley was not one to defy popular opinion.
The 25th president was a weak leader, but he served in stirring times. America’s annexation of the Philippines put us in the ranks of imperial powers. McKinley concluded, after much prayer, that he could neither return the Philippines to Spain nor turn the islands over to any other nation. He could not grant them independence, for in his view they were not ready for self-rule.
So the president concluded, “there was nothing left for us to do but to take [them], and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them.”
McKinley was reelected in 1900, only to be assassinated by an anarchist the next year. Mr. Morgan correctly describes McKinley’s presidency as “transitional,” for he was followed in office by the dynamic Theodore Roosevelt. However, the author’s conclusion that McKinley was “clearly one of our most important presidents” stretches belief.
• • •
Bill Wilson, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, was not a lovable guy. His parents were divorced when he was nine, his grandparents took over his upbringing, and he drifted through a troubled youth.
At age 22 he married Lois Burnham, a woman four years older than he who worked when he couldn’t and endured years of poverty. She stuck by him for 53 years despite his inability to hold a job, his alcoholism, and his infidelities. She also survived him by two decades.
Wilson was the principal author of the books “Alcoholics Anonymous” and “Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions” on which Alcoholics Anonymous and many other anti-addiction programs are based. His discovery “that each alcoholic has his or her own drinking story and his or her own road to sobriety,” Susan Cheever writes in My Name Is Bill: Bill Wilson — His Life and the Creation of Alcoholics Anonymous (Simon and Schuster, $24, 293 pages), is one of the main reasons that A.A. has survived while other groups have not.
Miss Cheever’s writing is cliched and awkward: “They could hardly bear to be apart for an hour, so the weekend stretched ahead like an eternity.” When Wilson was taken in by his in-laws after his third hospitalization for drinking, “Bill began to feel constrained by the Burnhams’ hospitality, and by the graceful life into which he had fallen like a rogue into a tub of butter.”
Because Wilson and his wife both wrote memoirs and this story has been tackled by dozens of writers, the reader can’t help wondering whether this book fills a need.
John M. and Priscilla S. Taylor are writers in McLean, Va.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.