A difficult book to read, partly due to its shifting perspectives, partly as a result of its strong odor of wasted lives.
Magazine writer Fox, who died last year, looks back at the sensational kidnapping saga that he started exploring four decades ago.
John Paul Getty III, 16 in 1973, vanished without warning while residing in Rome. The grandson of oil billionaire J. Paul Getty, the teenager was not attending school regularly but was following a dissolute path paved with alcohol, narcotics, women, sycophants and underworld types interested in the wealth he would inherit. From the moment of his disappearance, reports of a serious crime involving ransom demands alternated with rumors of a hoax, a setup plan by the alleged victim, perhaps with the complicity of his mother, Gail Harris Jeffries, the divorced wife of Getty II. Somehow, Fox won the trust of various players in the investigation. When Italian authorities received a severed ear that matched the ear of Getty III, the investigation heated up. The author lets the saga unfold slowly, with the disappearance not occurring until 130 pages in and the release of the young man back into society after five months of apparent captivity 100 pages later. The narrative is a mixture of Fox's voice and extended oral-history passages from Gail, a private sleuth hired by the senior Getty, and Getty III's former wife, among other characters who appear, disappear from the pages, then reappear. Fox writes that he gathered much of the material from conversations with Getty III, who wanted a collaborator for an autobiography. With the main subject and the author now dead, trying to sort among sheer fiction, unalloyed fact and the gray areas in between will be tough for many readers.
A difficult book to read, partly due to its shifting perspectives, partly as a result of its strong odor of wasted lives.Pub Date: May 7, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-01821-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
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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