Readers will sentence investigative journalist Norton's (Perfect Victim, not reviewed) dull true-crime tale to life on the shelf, without parole. Norton gives 1993's Sacramento, Calif., ``Arsenic and Old Lace'' murder trial a thorough if somewhat stuffy and obvious once- over. The case involved 60-ish Dorothea Puente, a pathological liar who bilked aging loners out of their entitlements and then killed and buried them under the well-manicured lawn of her illegal boarding house. Puente, who at various times had passed herself off as a qualified health care giver, took in Alvaro ``Bert'' Montoya, a mentally handicapped man. At first, Bert showed remarkable progress; he ceased to hear voices, and his grooming and appearance improved dramatically. However, when he later disappeared, a police search of Dorothea's home and grounds uncovered several corpses and her crimes were exposed. The strength of this book it that is offers an interesting study of how criminal trials are packaged for mass consumption, often without pause for reflection about the grief of the victim's survivors. Unfortunately, Norton herself repeatedly oversimplifies the proceedings while relying on manipulative character descriptions (``Dorothea, the white-haired granny'' or ``Bert, the loveable and trusting simpleton-turned- victim''). The arrest, the defendant's short lam to LA, subsequent capture, incarceration, and trial are covered in lavish detail; and no sight of a corpse, no sound of a saw buzzing through scalp and skull, or smell of a decomposing body escapes the author's bold gift for description. Yet one gets the feeling that Norton was granted a few substantial interviews with the peripheral characters, and even fewer with the central figures—a suspicion that is supported by footnotes throughout stating many figures' unwillingness to comment. Norton's often humorless style of reporting less visceral events is likely to have readers looking elsewhere in boredom, rather than looking away in horror.
Pub Date: June 21, 1994
ISBN: 0-688-09704-9
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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