I Am the Famous Carlos: The Story of Carlos the Jackal, the World's First Celebrity Terrorist

"A colorful and gripping portrait of a notorious terrorist." - Kirkus Reviews. He was the most wanted man in the world for decades. Carlos the Jackal, the Venezuelan-born terrorist, carried out a wave of attacks across Europe in the 1970s and 1980s. A ruthless self-proclaimed revolutionary, he claimed to fight for the Palestinian cause and communist ideology, but also worked as a mercenary for rogue regimes and organizations.
After bursting onto the world stage with the 1975 OPEC siege in Vienna, where he took 60 hostages and killed three people, he managed to evade capture for two decades. Finally arrested in a daring raid in Sudan in 1994, he was brought to justice in France where he is serving three life sentences for his reign of terror. This is the riveting story of how a pudgy schoolboy became the world's first celebrity terrorist."Hoag nails down the details of these events by employing an impressive amount of research; the text is supported by an extensive bibliography and endnotes.
It's a larger-than-life story, and the Jackal, with his drinking, womanizing, and penchant for violence, is a larger-than-life protagonist. Hoag leans into his lifestyle with her prose, and at times the work reads more like a thriller than a biography. Despite all the necessary exposition, the author manages to keep the pace very brisk, and she depicts her subject with a pitch-perfect combination of horror and grudging fascination.
Particularly exciting is Hoag's account of the "Rue Toullier bloodbath, " in which the Jackal was very nearly caught and only escaped by shooting his way past members of the Direction de Surveillance Territoire, the French domestic security equivalent of the FBI. "I'm not in the habit of killing, " the Jackal astoundingly said at one point, after a lifetime of killing. "I kill all those who betray me." Hoag deftly explores such contradictions in all their enduring mystery." -- Kirkus Reviews