Riveting and disturbing.
The chilling true story of an ordinary wife, mother, and hospice nurse who was raped and abducted by a stranger who had already killed her husband.
Sharp begins her story in April 1998, on the Monday afternoon she decided to plant roses outside her dream house before leaving to work the night shift at the hospice. The house was in Newark, Delaware, and Sharp and husband Nino were soon to celebrate 25 years of happy and fulfilling matrimony. As Sharp ponders all the what-ifs of that day—if it had rained, or if she had gone shopping—she recalls how her husband came home at 3 p.m. and went inside for a nap. Her roses planted, Sharp headed through the garage and into the kitchen, where someone hit her hard, her glasses fell off, and she fell to the floor. The next moment her assailant took her to the basement, raped her, then held a knife to her throat, tied her up, wrapped her in a quilt, and carried her to his car. In his home, more rapes followed, and she was kept gagged, blindfolded, and hogtied. On Tuesday evening, when her attacker switched on the radio, Sharp learned that Nino was dead and she was a suspect. She managed to escape when her captor left on Friday night for work, and the remainder of the narrative details her emotional and physical recovery, public and family reactions to her plight, and the trial itself. It was a daunting and emotionally fraught experience; the defense attorney tried to find inconsistencies in her story and even suggested that the accused was kind when he gave her water to drink. Though it took time and help, Sharp put her life back together, though like most crime victims, she cannot completely forget.
Riveting and disturbing.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-2916-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2003
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 2026 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.
