A scary piece of work, with even scarier implications.
A forensic psychiatrist takes well-turned clinical forays into the heads of multiple murderers, with additional long-distance thoughts on their peers in foreign countries and in the past.
Aided by veteran journalist Goldberg, Morrison shapes her experiences as a memoir and lets her prose express both analytical detachment and utter fascination. Nonetheless, she states, “I still could feel sickened about the nature of their crimes, no matter how detached I tried to be.” And these crimes are particularly dreadful. Morrison has spent 25 years trying to uncover some pattern to serial-killer behavior, a painstaking process of trying to understand why they do what they do by interviewing as many serial killers as she can get access to. Slowly the material accrues. John Wayne Gacy, she found, had the emotional makeup of an infant and “felt he was drowning when subjected to emotional complexity.” Robert Berdella displayed a total lack of empathy; he “couldn’t picture what the meaning of torture or even death is.” Serial killers typically show no social or psychological attachments, yet the author finds a terrible chemistry that suggests “serial murder at first sight exists and thrives much like love at first sight.” Killers had a “sudden urgency to get a victim. It wasn’t just a need; it was a drive, a compulsion”—an addiction of sorts. These discoveries pointed Morrison toward a genetic explanation of serial killing: something, she believes, causes an imbalance of the neurochemicals that trigger emotions and lead to actions. “I am firmly convinced there is something in the genes that leads a person to become a serial killer,” she asserts. “In other words, he is a killer before he is born.” Morrison has not been able to prove this theory conclusively, since her attempts to run tests on serial killers have, understandably, run into issues of free will.
A scary piece of work, with even scarier implications.Pub Date: May 4, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-052407-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2004
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
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