From the Publisher
"Riveting." -Entertainment Weekly "Too wild to be fiction. The movie should be directed by Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen working in tandem." -Joseph Wambaugh "Alternately funny, appalling, fascinating and scary." -Los Angeles Times "Hypnotizing, bizarre, scary, even weirdly funny at times." -Jeffrey Toobin "I read it in one big gulp." -John Sandford
Booklist
Harrowing…Alpert delivers an unflinching look at the humiliating, terrifying role of the victim, lacing his plight with commentary on contemporary crime and the creaking judicial system. The second part reads as compellingly as the first and with every bit as much suspense. An effective, one-two punch of a memoir.”
New York Times Book Review
[Alpert’s memoir is] well served by his litigator’s sense for dramatic pacing and telling detail. And throughout, Alpert wins over the reader the same way he did the kidnappers, with the force of his canny, self-assured, big-hearted personality.”
Newsday
Reading The Birthday Party is like watching a slow-motion train wreck—difficult to look at, but impossible to turn away from…The Birthday Party is a good read, but it is also an object lesson. We all need to pay attention to it.”
New York Times
[A] harrowing, often hilarious reconstruction of what should have been a garden-variety New York street crime…Precisely how this nebbishy Brooklyn boy, partial to peach-flavored Snapple iced tea and chocolate chip cookies, induced reverse Stockholm syndrome and maneuvered his way to freedom makes The Birthday Party one of the most exhilarating, improbable New York stories ever told.”
