This intricate re-creation of the February 1993 murder of three-year-old James Bulger by two 10-year-old boys in Bottle, England, is ugly, painful reading. Grisly and excessively detailed, the book attempts a delicate balance between potential sensationalism and informed, balanced journalism. To Smith's credit, it works. ``By way of recovering a perspective,'' he presents a long history of child crime to demonstrate that it is not new, not a result of the television age, not an ``emblem of decay'' in morals and values. Smith precisely retraces the path of Denise Bulger and her little boy, James, as they went shopping at the New Strand Mall nearly two years ago. He picks up with Jon Venables and Bobby Thompson at the moment they decide to skip school in favor of a shoplifting spree. (Amazingly, security cameras in a number of stores recorded the progress of both parties.) Jon and Bobby lured James away from his mother while she was in a butcher's shop. She noticed he was missing almost immediately and notified security. But by then the three boys were on a two-and-a-half-mile trek during which they were witnessed by dozens of people who assumed James was simply a fussy little brother. A few adults did confront them, noting the lumps and scratches on James's tear-streaked face, but paid no further attention. When his body was found on the railroad tracks near Walton Lane, his head had been bludgeoned and his torso severed by the trains. Blue paint and blood spattered everywhere matched the stains on Jon and Bobby's clothing. Smith includes the awful investigative interviews with the boys, recounting their versions of what they did, and details their trial on charges of abduction and murder. Found guilty, they will serve 15 years before being eligible for release. His amateur pop-psychological analyses of the killers' family lives aside, Smith, a solid writer and an excellent reporter (he writes for Esquire), makes this horrendous story almost readable. (Photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1995
ISBN: 1-55611-439-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Donald Fine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1995
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
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
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