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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlanticsenior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
When Kaysen was 18, in 1967, she was admitted to McLean Psychiatric Hospital outside Boston, where she would spend the next 18 months. Now, 25 years and two novels (Far Afield, 1990; Asa, As I Knew Him, 1987) later, she has come to terms with the experience- -as detailed in this searing account. First there was the suicide attempt, a halfhearted one because Kaysen made a phone call before popping the 50 aspirin, leaving enough time to pump out her stomach. The next year it was McLean, which she entered after one session with a bullying doctor, a total stranger. Still, she signed herself in: ``Reality was getting too dense...all my integrity seemed to lie in saying No.'' In the series of snapshots that follows, Kaysen writes as lucidly about the dark jumble inside her head as she does about the hospital routines, the staff, the patients. Her stay didn't coincide with those of various celebrities (Ray Charles, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell), but we are not likely to forget Susan, ``thin and yellow,'' who wrapped everything in sight in toilet paper, or Daisy, whose passions were laxatives and chicken. The staff is equally memorable: ``Our keepers. As for finders—well, we had to be our own finders.'' There was no way the therapists—those dispensers of dope (Thorazine, Stelazine, Mellaril, Librium, Valium)—might improve the patients' conditions: Recovery was in the lap of the gods (``I got better and Daisy didn't and I can't explain why''). When, all these years later, Kaysen reads her diagnosis (``Borderline Personality''), it means nothing when set alongside her descriptions of the ``parallel universe'' of the insane. It's an easy universe to enter, she assures us. We believe her. Every word counts in this brave, funny, moving reconstruction. For Kaysen, writing well has been the best revenge.
Pub Date: June 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-679-42366-4
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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