The painful story of a Wichita, Kansas, woman who learns through psychotherapy that the homicidal maniac stalking her resides in her subconscious self, a product of repressed, long- buried memories of sexual child abuse. With her full cooperation, journalist Stone recounts Ruth Finley's life from the day in 1977 when she received the first nasty phone call to June 1988, when she attended her last therapy session. Finley's husband, Ed, had gone into the hospital at about the time a Kansas serial killer resurfaced. According to her analyst, Dr. Andrew Pickens, those events jarred Finley's subconscious into creating ``the Poet,'' a vicious man who harassed her for the next several years by letter and phone, who threw eggs at her house and left all manner of things on her porch—rocks, feces, a red bandanna, a Molotov cocktail. He cut her phone lines and accosted her on the street and at the mall. Then, in November 1978, Finley reported that she was abducted by two men who took her paycheck and other items. She got away, but on another occasion, the Poet attacked her in a mall parking lot, stabbing her repeatedly. She managed to escape and drove home with the knife still stuck in her side and one of the assailant's gloves hanging from a window. All very real to Ruth Finley, but police chief Richard LaMunyon doubted her stories; his department had kept her and ``the Poet'' under surveillance for years, without result. (LaMunyon still contends that Finley was fully cognizant of her actions and therefore criminally liable.) Finley began intensive therapy with Dr. Pickens, who suspected that she suffered from a ``dissociative disorder,'' divorcing her conscious self from painful experience. Through therapy, Finley allowed ``negative memories of her childhood to slip out.'' Referring to herself as that ``little girl,'' she brings forth recollections of brutal sexual assaults by an unnamed neighbor when she was three years old. Stone's evenhanded, serious treatment of this material keeps it from being unbearable or cheaply sensational. (8 pages b&w photos—not seen)
Pub Date: April 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-78085-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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.
