This debut collaboration from journalists Knoedelseder (Stiffed, 1993) and Freedman is a comprehensive portrait of the horrific teen-mob murder of Philadelphia youth Eddie Polec and its aftermath, portraying the Polecs— grief and recovery against a complex tapestry of urban issues with acuity and sensitivity. Polec’s murder was shocking by any measure of modern mayhem. A gang of teens from neighboring Abington, responding to disrespect from Fox Chase kids, hunted down the ill-starred bystander and methodically beat him to death with baseball bats. The tragedy became national news following the revelation that the city’s beleaguered 911 system had logged dozens of calls during the melee which were handled ineptly or rudely during a crucial 40-minute period that might have saved Polec’s life. Opposing factions within a tumultuous city were soon involved, including Mayor Rendell and the operators— union; though the principal suspects were quickly arrested, the case threatened to descend into urban sideshow dissonance. The authors wisely focus on the trauma suffered by the Polec family, and their bravery in rising above it. Their approach lends grace to a decidedly wrenching subject. Especially compelling is the tale of John Polec, an average man suddenly thrust under scrutiny, who channels his grief into exhortations against extralegal retribution and efforts to compel the city towards meaningful reform of 911 procedures and technology (ultimately achieved only after the threat of a lawsuit). Finally, the book’s finely tuned emotional nuance cloaks a gripping courtroom drama, in which a galvanized prosecutor must contend with a skilled criminal defense team that has few scruples in confounding evidence of heinous culpability. In a disquieting coda, six perpetrators are convicted of third-degree murder and lesser crimes; the book avoids speculation regarding their youthful embrace of evil, an omission that darkens an otherwise tonic narrative. Still, this incisive portrayal of the Polec murder and Philadelphia’s 911 crisis provides a sobering account of personal tragedy as the crucible of social change. (8 pages b&w photos)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-571-19924-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2000
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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