Succeeds as a vivid reconstruction of a gruesome crime and the capture and trial of the murderer, but the appended memoir is...
A bloody story of murder and survival, combined with the author’s account of her life afterward, assisted by true-crime vet Jackson (Love Me to Death, 2002, etc.).
Salcido was not quite three years old in 1989 when her father slit her throat and left her to die in a dump in California’s Sonoma Valley. That same night, he also killed her two sisters, her mother, her grandmother and the man he suspected of being his wife’s lover. Some parts of the book—the prologue, epilogue and certain sections of chapter—are clearly identified as Jackson’s work. Others, presented as being narrated by Salcido, are based not on personal recollections but on newspaper articles, court documents and interviews with detectives and witnesses. The final chapters chronicle Salcido’s life after the murders. Her grandfather—a member of a politically, religiously and culturally reactionary Catholic organization, the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property—felt unable to care for Salcido and arranged for her adoption by a Midwestern family that belonged to the arch-conservative group. Isolated, lonely and poorly home-schooled, Salcido got away at age 17 by joining a Carmelite order. When bouts of depression made life in the convent impossible, she was asked to leave. Her next refuge was a center for troubled girls called God’s Cowgirl Ranch. Alarmed by the harshness of discipline there, she turned for help to her grandfather, who took her in, as did two uncles later on. Once she was living a more normal life, the details of which she skims over, Salcido began researching the story of the murders and got in touch with people familiar with the case. As part of her efforts to come to terms with her past, she contacted her father on death row in San Quentin; her attempts to understand him are genuinely moving.
Succeeds as a vivid reconstruction of a gruesome crime and the capture and trial of the murderer, but the appended memoir is sketchy.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-121005-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2009
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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