Readers are given every bit of evidence available and will be hard-pressed to reach a verdict; it’s fun trying, though. Fans...
A new history of the trial of the late 19th century: Lizzie Borden (1860-1927), accused of the murder of her father and stepmother.
Robertson, a former Supreme Court clerk and legal adviser at The Hague, amply shows how the wheels of justice often move slowly, by small steps. First, there was an inquest, in which Lizzie testified along with her maid, Bridget Sullivan. Lizzie and her sister Emma were estranged from their father and, especially, their stepmother. They were also jealous of property their father had purchased for his wife’s sister; attempting to mollify them, unsuccessfully, he had deeded another property to them. Accounting for her morning, Lizzie offered differing statements about what she was doing. With Emma visiting out of town, it was only Lizzie who had the opportunity to kill both parents, even hours apart. After the inquest came Lizzie’s arrest and imprisonment, where she exhibited a stoic demeanor that would carry her from the preliminary hearing through the trial. She was self-possessed and unruffled, ready to accept whatever fate dealt her. While she did break down a few times, as when her father’s skull was presented, for the most part she seemed confident and intent on following every testimony. Constantly whispering in the ear of George Robinson, her lawyer, she seemed to treat the trial as an exercise in controlling what the jury was allowed to hear. Robertson presents the story with the thoroughness one expects from an attorney, but she manages to avoid the tedious repetitiveness inherent in a trial by providing close looks at other contemporaneous elements such as Lizzie’s attempt to buy poison, a newly discovered hatchet, and the contradictions of the prosecution’s witnesses.
Readers are given every bit of evidence available and will be hard-pressed to reach a verdict; it’s fun trying, though. Fans of crime novels will love it.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6837-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
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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