Burton should receive an A for effort. If in truth he has identified the killer—he concedes he has not identified a second...
A former U.S. State Department intelligence officer tries to solve a 1973 murder case.
Burton (Ghost: Confessions of a Counterterrorism Agent, 2008) lives in Austin, Texas, after a career as a policeman and a chief with the State Department Diplomatic Security Service. He is currently a vice president at Strategic Forecasting (STRATFOR), a private company that has been termed a “shadow CIA.” None of those jobs caused the author to forget a murder in his normally quiet Bethesda, Md., neighborhood when he was 16. The murder victim was Josef Alon, a husband and father who had lived in Israel and served as a successful fighter pilot before a diplomatic/military posting to Washington, D.C. Nobody harmed the daughters, and no robbery had occurred. After entering law enforcement, the author vowed that he would try to solve the homicide, unofficially and off the clock. Writing with military historian Bruning (co-author: House to House, 2007), Burton conveys an impressive passion to solve a mystery that higher authorities either did not want to solve or had already solved but refused to acknowledge. As the author guides readers through more than 35 years of on-and-off investigating, he shares speculative musings, evidentiary dead ends and occasional solid advances. Because so many individuals are direct or indirect suspects, many of them whom Burton cannot or will not name, others with apparent aliases, his investigation can be difficult to track, and long stretches without progress become tiresome. Eventually, he solved the murder, at least to his intellectual satisfaction. However, much of the evidence is circumstantial, and some of it is of questionable reliability, given its second-hand or third-hand nature in the minds of elderly men who have been employed as professional dissemblers.
Burton should receive an A for effort. If in truth he has identified the killer—he concedes he has not identified a second man who drove the getaway car—he should receive an A+ as a detective.Pub Date: April 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-230-62055-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2011
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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