Mesmerizing, mournful portrait of serial-killer/rapist Arthur Shawcross—who also practiced necrophilia and cannibalism—that digs deep to lay his tortured psyche bare. Olsen has profiled numerous madmen before (Predator, 1991, etc.) but rarely with such diligence—or one so heinous. He presents Shawcross's story in oral-history form, binding together testimony from the killer (mostly Q&A transcripts), cops, psychiatrists, relatives of Shawcross's victims, etc., with his own extensive narration. An expert storyteller, Olsen begins with high melodrama: the disappearance in 1972 in Watertown, New York, of ten-year-old Jack Blake—Shawcross's first victim, raped, mutilated, and killed. Despite the insistence of Jack's mother that neighbor Shawcross—then a notably eccentric 27-year-old Vietnam vet—had slain her boy, it took a second killing, of a local girl, to put Shawcross behind bars for a presumed 25 years. But after 14 years, the killer convinced a parole board of his rehabilitation and was freed. Moving to Rochester and marrying a prison pen-pal, Shawcross went on a years'-long spree of killing prostitutes. Dogged police work and a lucky break finally did him in. Olsen closely details Shawcross's gruesome crimes and the cops' counterpoint, but his focus is on motivation: What made Shawcross kill? The author excavates the murderer's early years, uncovering an unhappy home but no striking abuse; explores Shawcross's own rational—that he became a killer in Vietnam—and finds his stories of jungle savagery to be tall tales; and locates only a few clues in Shawcross's accounts of his murders. The unexpected answer is revealed at book's end, in testimony from a psychiatrist who discovered behind the killer's compulsion a terrible biological imperative: an extra Y chromosome and a rare chemical imbalance. Olsen explains Shawcross without excusing him, creating an unforgettable portrait, horrifying yet compassionate, of a doomed modern-day monster.
Pub Date: March 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-385-29936-2
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1993
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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