Fiction or not, a decent book, easily read and worth it for the ending.
James Willoughby Carnac admits in his autobiography that he is Jack the Ripper; but it is the curator of the Montacute TV, Radio, and Toy Museum in Somerset, Alan Hicken, who has brought the book to light.
Hicken acquired the manuscript in a bundle of memorabilia from the family of S.G. Hulme-Beaman, creator of a popular British children’s cartoon character, Larry the Lamb. Hulme-Beaman was Carnac’s executor and apparently was unable to publish the manuscript per Carnac’s wishes, even after expunging the lurid evisceration descriptions. The story here is accompanied by a lengthy, almost line-by-line analysis by journalist and noted Ripper-ologist Paul Begg (Jack the Ripper: The Facts, 2005, etc.). The analysis is repetitive, tedious and unnecessary; readers can decide for themselves on the believability of this tale. The Ripper’s story, and his obsession with knives and blood, make for interesting reading, as it deals with the man and his stalkings more than his atrocious acts. Whoever wrote it seems to understand the mind of this killer, certainly a madman, who murdered solely for the love of killing. His parents’ murders/suicides seem to be the beginning of his bloodlust, and his desire to cut flesh naturally followed. The six Whitechapel murders committed in 1888 began and ended with no cause, no clues and no conviction. Here is the man who admitted to hearing voices and had a vision of a man who assured him he’d never be caught. The bizarre dream of his ancestors as hangmen and torturers lining the streets of London show a man possessed. Throughout the book, as he insists on his obsession with knives cutting flesh, readers may wonder why he didn’t become a coroner or an anatomy teacher, dissecting bodies all day long. Also included are facsimiles of the original manuscript and some brief information on the victims.
Fiction or not, a decent book, easily read and worth it for the ending.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4022-8058-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2013
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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