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THE MAN WHO COULD NOT KILL ENOUGH

THE SECRET MURDERS OF MILWAUKEE'S JEFFREY DAHMER

Impressively detailed account of the Jeffrey Dahmer serial- murder case. Schwartz, covering crime for the Milwaukee Journal, was the first reporter to reach Dahmer's apartment after police found a human head in his refrigerator. In this first-person account, drawing on in-depth research, the reporter covers every angle of the case and also provides an interesting running commentary on her crime-reporter's beat. After a Grand Guignol catalogue of Dahmer's apartment and descriptions of interviews with his neighbors (``We used to hear sawing...at all hours''), Schwartz offers telling details of Dahmer's childhood—unremarkable except for a streak of cruelty to animals; adolescence—he was the class clown, with a drinking problem; and young adulthood—Dahmer dismembered his first victim at 18, then joined the Army, where he got poor marks as a medical corpsman (he could not stand to take blood samples). Schwartz digs hard to find out why Dahmer wasn't recognized and stopped sooner—when arrested for 17 murders, he had twice been through the court system for sex crimes and was under the supervision of a probation officer—but comes up with no definitive answer. According to one expert on serial murderers, she reports, thousands of people fit the profile, but there's no way to predict who will kill. Schwartz's account includes notes on the work of the forensic anthropologist who matched the jumble of skeletal remains to the individual victims; talks with victim's families; and coverage of the storm of controversy—pitting the Milwaukee police chief against his own men, black cops against white cops, and the city's black, gay, and Laotian communities against all cops—that arose when it was revealed that, two months before his arrest, when a naked and bleeding Laotian boy escaped from the killer's home, Dahmer was investigated by three white cops but not taken in. And, in fact, the boy was returned to Dahmer. Definitive—a must read for true-crime votaries. (Sixteen pages of photos—not seen.)

Pub Date: June 1, 1992

ISBN: 1-55972-117-0

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Birch Lane Press

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1992

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WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...

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A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.

Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.

Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6

Page Count: 248

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015

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GOOD ECONOMICS FOR HARD TIMES

Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.

“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.

It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.

Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.

Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0

Page Count: 432

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019

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