![YOU COULD DO SOMETHING AMAZING WITH YOUR LIFE [YOU ARE RAOUL MOAT]](https://d1fd687oe6a92y.cloudfront.net/img/user-media/titles/title/cover/dd816b7bcbc04a80973193afaa213617/9781925106558.jpg.300x0_q85_autocrop.webp)
True crime from a radically different perspective.
A British journalist probes the troubled psyche of a notorious killer.
In his first book, Hankinson takes great formal risks in presenting a story that might sustain suspense for American readers but is well-known in Britain from saturation newspaper coverage and previous books. The subject is the last week or so in the life of Raoul Moat, a period in which he was released from prison and proceeded to gun down the new boyfriend of his former girlfriend as well as wounding her and a police officer. Moat then proceeded to hide out with two friends whom he termed hostages but who were subsequently convicted as accomplices. The tick-tock narrative is written in both the present tense and the second person, meaning that Moat is the “you” addressed by the author. Thus, readers get inside the head of the murderer, thinking his thoughts and explaining his motivations. The approach may well cultivate even more empathy than a more common first-person narrative, but readers will hardly feel comfortable in Moat’s skin. Obsession leads to plenty of repetition, as he rants about how this is as much his former girlfriend’s fault: for betraying him and shunning him and mocking him and ultimately for costing another man his life by lying about him. Paranoia runs rampant throughout, as police are out to get him when he has done nothing wrong, psychiatry fails him (though he often fails to keep appointments), and social workers are “witches.” The context provided by Hankinson, particularly following Moat’s death, goes a long way toward showing how much of this tragedy could have been prevented, how the police failed the victims and social services failed the troubled killer, and how a disturbed mother and a troubled childhood had left Moat marked. Ultimately, though, putting both the narrative and readers inside the head of the subject is a gamble that meets with mixed success.
True crime from a radically different perspective.Pub Date: March 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-925106-55-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Scribe
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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