A revealing confessional that makes this most reviled of crimes a bit more understandable.
A convicted child molester embarks on a journey into the criminal justice system–and his soul–in this troubling, absorbing memoir.
The author, then a Manhattan attorney, was arrested in 2003 for having sex with a 14-year-old male prostitute. A police search then found his pornographic photographs, some of other juveniles. His arrest and prosecution brings his affluent life of heedless hedonism crashing down. He spends a frightening night in jail, wonders how he can tell his mother and siblings the shameful news, and faces the prospect of disbarment, unemployment and permanent enrollment on the sex-offender registry if convicted. His lawyer assures Cornelio that a plea bargain can at least keep him out of jail, but an intransigent prosecutor and a look at the photos shake the attorney’s confidence. Cornelio doesn’t even have personal tales of childhood molestation to persuade the judge to have mercy. As the wheels of justice grind on, Cornelio undertakes a personal inquiry into his legal and moral culpability. (Coy about whether he had sex with his accuser, he does admit to having relations with a 16-year-old.) The author is open about his decades spent cruising for youthful–mostly black or Hispanic–hustlers, and not very apologetic about them. He celebrates the male beauties he’s drawn to and castigates society’s hypocrisy in marketing teen sexuality in advertising and entertainment while prosecuting those who act on these signals. Cornelio is a skillful, at times beguiling writer–he makes readers feel his anguish and fear and the spiritual crisis they provoke. Still, he can be self-serving and vain. He imagines he may have conferred a “blessing” on his partners with his rapturous regard, if not the bondage he subjected them to, and never really grapples with the harm they may have suffered. Nonetheless, his odyssey illuminates society’s muddled strictures about sex–and the predicament of those who run afoul of them.
A revealing confessional that makes this most reviled of crimes a bit more understandable.Pub Date: Dec. 18, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4392-1388-9
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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