A call to reopen the 40-year-old Sheppard murder case, as heavy and relentless as a killer's weapon. While coauthor Sheppard, then age seven, lay sleeping in the next room of the family's lakeside Cleveland home, someone raped and then battered to death his 31-year-old mother, Marilyn. The year was 1954, the nation was gripped with a McCarthy-esque zeal to indict the murderer of pretty Marilyn, and so the media and then the police pounced on her husband, Dr. Sam Sheppard. Never mind that Dr. Sheppard, a prominent osteopath and police surgeon, should have been cleared on forensic evidence alone: For starters, not a trace of Marilyn's widely spattered blood was found on his clothes. Dr. Sheppard's account of the murder sceneMarilyn's cry for help, his being struck on the back of the neck by a tall ``bushy-haired intruder''was loudly scorned by the press and by Cleveland's megalomaniacal coroner, who issued a ``verdict'' announcing Dr. Sheppard's guilt. The trial was, in the words of the Supreme Court, a ``carnival'': Among other outrages, the press published the names, addresses, and photos of the unsequestered jurors. Dr. Sheppard was pronounced guilty of second-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. Twelve years later, F. Lee Bailey successfully appealed the conviction, and Dr. Sheppard was freed. Marilyn's murderer was never found, but the authors name four possible culprits (a family friend, the couple next door, and, most convincingly, a window-washer later convicted of an unrelated murder). This tantalizing true-crime story has an obvious tie-in to the Simpson trial, which attorney and journalist Cooper and Sam Reese Sheppard repeatedly note but don't really explore. But the sledgehammer style, frequent time shifts, and needless emphasis on Sam Reese Sheppard's victimhood detract from the otherwise compelling narrative. The story that inspired the TV series and movie The Fugitiveminus the Hollywood ending. (illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 19, 1995
ISBN: 1-55553-241-1
Page Count: 464
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1995
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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