Readers will surely remember Jack Slade henceforth. A treat for Western history buffs and fans of true crime.
An ambitious, well-written effort to restore a Wild West desperado to history.
Broad Street Review editor Rottenberg (In the Kingdom of Coal, 2003, etc.) has a yen for back roads geographical and historical. This long tale, full of shaggy-dog elements, begins on a back road on the High Plains that was once America’s chief highway for wagon trains crossing to California and the Pacific Northwest by way of South Pass, Wyo. There he picks up the trail of Joseph Alfred “Jack” Slade, a figure long forgotten, turning up these days in the occasional monograph or journal article. Slade, by Rottenberg’s vigorous account, has all the makings of a Western character that ought to be remembered, begging for portrayal by, say, Tommy Lee Jones or Russell Crowe. Zelig-like, he turns up as a muleteer, wagon-train driver and stagecoach exec along the Emigrant Trail, serving as de facto law of the land over a large area of what is now Nebraska, Colorado and Wyoming. His stern enforcement of the law in a time of outlaws and dry-gulchers, to say nothing of secessionists, kept a steady flow of ore streaming from the western goldfields to the federal treasury. Yet this lawman went bad, turning to drink and crime, becoming a bully and general pest across his former domain. Ironically, given that he was one of those who “could believe that a few salutary hangings might enhance their security,” he met his end at the hands of a vigilante mob, as Mark Twain recorded in Roughing It—inaccurately, Rottenberg shows. Likening Slade to the twin leads of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Rottenberg considers why Slade’s trail went south, and why he is not better remembered—perhaps because “he resisted neat categorization…He could not even be labeled a good man or a bad one.”
Readers will surely remember Jack Slade henceforth. A treat for Western history buffs and fans of true crime.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59416-070-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Westholme Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 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.
