An effective recruiting poster for women in police work, and a highly readable memoir for law-and-order buffs of whatever...
Watch out, Clarice Starling—there's a new sheriff in town, and she's the real deal.
Comparisons with the worried FBI profiler who chases Hannibal Lecter around the globe are inevitable; though Thomas Harris may not have based his character directly upon now-retired special agent DeLong, she fits the bill for a real-life counterpart very nicely indeed. DeLong adds a solid entry to the library of real-crime literature, recounting her efforts over a distinguished career to bring all manner of reprobates to justice, from scum-of-the-earth child molesters to more rarified figures like the Unabomber and the Tylenol Killer. Her pages are packed with grim statistics—99 percent of all sex crimes, she notes, are committed by men, a significant number of them over the age of 50; fewer than half of the 200 to 300 children who go missing for more than 24 hours return home alive—but, despite such dour numbers, her narrative is highly personalized and full of juicy anecdotes that make it a (sometimes guilty) pleasure to read. It's clear from those tight stories that DeLong took her work seriously—as she writes, she firmly believes that “the Bureau [is] a big shark fence protecting the world from the dangers and predators of the deep,” though, she adds later, extending the benthic metaphor, “It is up to us as citizens, as a society . . . to decide who should be swimming freely in our midst.” Her devotion to the FBI did not keep her from falling afoul, late in her career, of agency rules forbidding moonlighting, to which she had to turn to pay the bills. DeLong writes effectively and without overmuch rancor about the culture of the FBI, a once males-only club (thanks to former director J. Edgar Hoover's antipathy toward women, institutionalized in an agency-wide conviction that women just couldn't hack the blood-and-guts work of crime-fighting) that she helped storm. When DeLong entered the agency, she notes, “women represented less than 4 percent of the agent force of 8,000.” She adds, “Today we're still a minority but a much more significant one—15 percent of the total of 11,500 agents.”
An effective recruiting poster for women in police work, and a highly readable memoir for law-and-order buffs of whatever persuasion.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7868-6707-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2001
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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