Readable, appealing true crime with an undercurrent of unease at the violence creeping into so many postindustrial “edge...
Propulsive account of a hard-charging homicide unit in a high-crime Washington, D.C., suburb.
Wilber (Rawhide Down: The Near Assassination of Ronald Reagan, 2011), who covers the Justice Department for the Los Angeles Times, develops a vivid sense of place alongside gritty workaday realities, resulting in a fresh take on the familiar topic of killers and their pursuers. He focuses on Prince George’s County, a sprawling “microcosm of the new America” that conceals startling murder rates, even during the chilly February of 2013, when the detectives he shadowed felt “there was simply too much pent-up violence on the streets, and it needed an outlet.” The resulting 12 murders included gang sprees, home invasions, drug-conspiracy killings, and predatory robberies. The rash of violence fully taxed the 25 detectives whom Wilber profiles, a diverse, eccentric, yet accomplished array who can be “like cut-ups in high-school biology class”—notwithstanding their grisly surroundings and the challenge of investigation, equal parts forensic precision, bureaucratic documentation, and Kafka-esque conversations with criminal prevaricators. Such interviews with suspects make up several tense stretches, where “for the most part, the suspect deflects and evades” while still giving away insights to their interrogators (and Wilber). In a narrative light on technical and tactical aspects of policing, the author focuses on environmental and tactile details, humanizing his detectives and a supporting cast of victims, survivors, and perpetrators. Many murder victims are entrenched in the regional underground of drug dealing and serial crime, making the detectives jaded and the investigations a slog; contrastingly, the detectives work furiously to solve the vicious killings of a teenage honor student and an elderly woman. Regarding these cases involving innocent victims, one veteran detective exclaims, “We are going old-school here.” Wilber embedded with the unit for several months, until his “narrative architecture” suggested itself; this immersive approach allows him to capture the cops’ inner monologues and their prickly exchanges with criminals and one another with effective clarity.
Readable, appealing true crime with an undercurrent of unease at the violence creeping into so many postindustrial “edge city” communities.Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9881-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
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 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.
