With great diligence, the author illuminates the murderer’s darkest thoughts without romanticizing them—and gives the...
The haunting stories of 10 slain women (4 of whom were never found) constitute this analysis of the hunt for serial killer Joseph Naso.
For decades, Naso photographed, raped, and murdered women, leaving no clues until 2010, when a probation officer searched his home and discovered a list of 10 unnamed “girls” whose locations in Northern California matched the crime scenes of several unsolved homicides. Swinney (Monster, 2016, etc.) uses court documents and police reports, letters from the murderer, and interviews with law enforcement and survivors to retrace Naso’s steps, creating a chilling profile of a serial killer and the unfortunate women who crossed his path. The author pegs Naso, a photographer with a wife and children, as a narcissistic misogynist whose sexual urges became increasingly difficult to satisfy until “the massive urge to kill, stemming from an inner perspective to take complete control over a woman, finally overcame him.” Swinney, a police detective, offers sharp insights about the cops who failed to tie Naso to his crimes. When Pamela Parsons was reported missing, asserts Swinney, “the fact the police didn’t look for Pamela is not an indicator of negligence on their behalf…unless a person reported missing is considered endangered or at-risk, police will not search for them.” Since many of Naso’s victims were prostitutes whose deaths provoked little public outrage, Swinney’s compassionate portrayal of their struggles, relationships, and displays of courage tugs at the heartstrings: “As her mind tried to process the John’s home, she again looked at the photographs on the coffee table. Her heart jumped when she recognized one of the girls in the photos.” A collection of photos and a myth-busting chapter on the connection between Naso and the Alphabet Killer in Rochester, New York, round out this thorough, humanizing dissection of the case.
With great diligence, the author illuminates the murderer’s darkest thoughts without romanticizing them—and gives the victims the written equivalent of a proper burial.Pub Date: May 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-987902-32-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: RJ Parker
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
