A classic, seamy portrait of widespread moral turpitude, conveyed with crackling Boston-Irish sarcasm.
Boston Herald reporter Carr tracks a pair of Beantown siblings along a twisted trail of extortion, graft, murder and other crimes that overran even the FBI.
Making it clear that he will not be unduly obsessed with journalistic objectivity here, the author describes his behavior during Billy Bulger’s testimony at a 2003 congressional hearing: “In full view of the CSPAN camera, I periodically grimaced, made faces, stuck out my tongue, rolled my eyes, and grabbed my throat when I thought Billy was being less than forthcoming.” Carr goes on to document that Billy’s reputation as “the good brother” was as misleading as his congressional testimony. He follows Billy’s ascent from Boston’s notorious Southie neighborhood (which he served in the Massachusetts House of Representatives to his eventual presidency at the University of Massachusetts. Big brother Whitey Bulger was in Carr’s estimation a fulltime, nonpareil crook, possibly the model for the hit man in George V. Higgins’s celebrated Boston crime novel, The Friends of Eddie Coyle. For nearly three decades, the author contends, Billy worked inside the system while Whitey worked outside the law; the crux of Carr’s thesis is that they cooperated in buying and corrupting whomever they could not intimidate or, in Whitey’s case, permanently remove. Among those bought, the author asserts, was FBI agent Zip Connolly, another Southie boy; it was a congressional investigation of corruption in the Boston office of the FBI that finally cost Billy his job at UMass. Billy’s eventual disgrace tainted an associated host of Boston political hacks and bureaucrats, but he still draws a state pension; Whitey remains at large, reportedly sighted in locales as disparate as Thailand and Portugal.
A classic, seamy portrait of widespread moral turpitude, conveyed with crackling Boston-Irish sarcasm.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2006
ISBN: 0-446-57651-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2005
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
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