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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2024 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.
bookshelf
