The Birthday Party: A Memoir of Survival

by Stanley N. Alpert

Overview

On January 21, 1998, the night before his thirty-eighth birthday, federal prosecutor Stanley N. Alpert was kidnapped off the streets of Manhattan by a car full of gun-toting thugs looking to use his ATM card. He ended up blindfolded in a Brooklyn apartment as his captors changed their plans, alternately threatening him and his family, seeking legal advice, expounding on the "gangsta" life, and offering him the services of their prostitute girlfriends as a birthday present. All the while, Alpert, still blindfolded, talked with them, played on their attitudes and fears, and memorized every detail he could in the event that he ever managed to get out of there alive.

Filled with immediacy, drama, and extraordinary characters, The Birthday Party reads like a thriller-but every word is true.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780425219119
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	01/02/2008
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	682,336
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.90(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Stanley N. Alpert served for thirteen years with the U.S. Department of Justice as an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, where he was chief of environmental litigation. There, Alpert investigated, prosecuted, or supervised many complex civil and criminal cases, some resulting in multimillion-dollar awards.

Editorial Reviews

"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

From the Publisher

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.”

Booklist

[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.”

New York Times Book Review

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.”

Newsday

[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.”

New York Times