Masterful research, although some material appears to function as a story-stretcher.
A popular true-crime writer offers his fifth in a chilling series on serial killers.
Schechter has written about familiar murderers like Ed Gein (Deviant, 1998) and H.H. Holmes (Depraved, 1996), but this time he focuses on a deformed 14-year-old killer whose rampage shocked 19th-century Boston. Jesse Harding Pomeroy was arrested in 1874 for the brutal murder of a four-year-old boy and was quickly nicknamed “The Boston Boy Fiend.” His sadistic career had begun three years earlier with the sexual torture of several younger boys. Five of his victims identified him from his oversized head and his milky right eye: he ended up sentenced to six years in reform school (where he thrilled to the punitive beatings of other boys). A born psychopath, he played the system and got out early. His next act was to kill a young girl who came into his mother’s store, followed by the child who ended his string of crimes. Schechter introduces the story with an informative overview of various periods in history—including the 1990s—where child killers raised a social alarm. He also notes that Pomeroy made a Lecteresque cameo in Caleb Carr’s novel The Alienist. More compelling is Schechter’s reconstruction of the sensation-hungry times: he offers newspaper clips, accounts of other crimes, clashing diagnoses from forensic alienists, and bizarre social theories such as the concern that lurid dime novels created such monsters. Pomeroy, who wrote a self-serving autobiography, received a controversial death sentence that was later commuted to life in solitary. His persistent attempts to escape surprised everyone and kept him in the Boston papers for the next 50 years.
Masterful research, although some material appears to function as a story-stretcher.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-671-01448-X
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2000
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
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