Despite minor flaws, there is much to learn and enjoy for crime-solving fans and American history buffs.
A thorough recounting of the career of Eliot Ness (1903–1957), from humble beginning to humble ending, with spectacular fame in between.
Al Capone may have gone to prison for tax evasion, but Perry (The Girls of Murder City: Fame, Lust, and the Beautiful Killers Who Inspired Chicago, 2010) understands that the name Ness is synonymous with shutting down Capone's bootleg operation. The author ably shows that there was far more to Ness’ career than just his battles with Capone, with accomplishments that may even outweigh his work during Prohibition. Unlike many of his colleagues, Ness did not fade into the background when the law was repealed. After a short stint in Cincinnati, he moved to Cleveland, where the mayor made him director of public safety with instructions to clean up the city. His years in Cleveland were probably the best of his career, with Ness implementing many firsts in the police department that are now standard procedure. Unfortunately, after leaving Cleveland, Ness never re-entered law enforcement and wasn't successful in his other work. Alongside intense and energetic investigative tales, Perry injects humor into the story with anecdotes—e.g., when a Cleveland patrolman, gun drawn, stopped Ness on the street. Though Ness identified himself, the patrolman was skeptical, insisting he was just as likely to be President Franklin D. Roosevelt. “Eliot carefully produced his ID and said that, with FDR’s approval, he would like to be on his way,” writes the author. Perry also peppers the book with his own colorful language. While this works in his favor when he calls a bad area of town “Cleveland’s colostomy bag,” it is jarring and off-kilter when he writes that Ness “gave Stafford a little smile, savoring the moment like a postcoital cigarette.”
Despite minor flaws, there is much to learn and enjoy for crime-solving fans and American history buffs.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-670-02588-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2014
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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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