An important, if imperfect, account that will captivate and outrage readers.
Think cops are your friends? If you’re a rape victim, think again.
Lueders, news editor of a weekly paper in Madison, Wisc., follows Patty (no last name given) from the night she was attacked, through the final, riveting trial of her rapist. The legally blind single mother woke up one night in her Madison duplex to feel the point of a knife against her cheek and hear the man in her bed whisper, “Don’t say anything, and no one will get hurt.” When the assailant finally left, she called the police, expecting help. Instead, Patty herself came under suspicion. Detective Tom Woodmansee, on a one-man crusade to punish women who made up sexual-assault charges, quickly decided she was lying. Claiming he needed another hair sample, he summoned Patty to the police station. “I know you made this up,” he said, refusing to let her leave until she confessed. Desperate to get away from Woodmansee, she recanted and then called a rape crisis center to report her forced confession. Patty was charged with obstruction, a misdemeanor that potentially carried a sentence of nine months in jail or a hefty fine. Eventually, DNA evidence helped vindicate her. Lueders was by no means a detached reporter of Patty’s travails; he championed her in the press and helped her connect to legal advocates. Nonetheless, he makes an effort to be evenhanded here; though he depicts Woodmansee as an unambiguous villain, he also acknowledges that sometimes women do falsify rape charges. The text contains a few embarrassingly amateurish moments, as when Lueders opens a discussion of trial strategy with a quotation from NYPD Blue, and too many chapters end with such breathless cliffhangers as, “It was an exercise that would prove helpful to Patty’s case but be devastating to Patty.” The well-developed cast of characters and vivid dialogue compensate for these gaffes.
An important, if imperfect, account that will captivate and outrage readers.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2006
ISBN: 0-299-21960-7
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Terrace Books/Univ. of Wisconsin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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