An initially enlightening and informative feminist slant ultimately becomes a predictable, grating agenda.
Emmy-winning journalist Velez-Mitchell profiles some sensational recent crimes, arguing that many were precipitated by shameful secrets also harbored by plenty of Americans who never resort to murder.
The author sets the tone for her comprehensive exposé in the first chapter, which tells the macabre stories of Imette St. Guillen and Teresa Halbach, two young women who were raped and barbarically slain. From there, she surveys and deconstructs a variety of high-profile crimes. Among the more compelling: the Hollywood prosecution of legendary music producer (and firearm aficionado) Phil Spector, accused of killing actress Lana Clarkson; the unfathomable murders committed by several Texas Christian mothers, most notably Andrea Yates, who drowned her five young children in the bathtub; the execution-style slayings of their wives and kids by police officer David Camm and porn-obsessed Neil Entwistle; the story of charming, cheating Scott Peterson, convicted of killing his pregnant wife Laci on Christmas Eve; the deadly show-biz dance of Robert Blake and Bonnie Lee Bakley; and the media-hyped statutory rape of teenage boys by their schoolteachers. Velez-Mitchell maintains an unflinchingly feminist viewpoint in her blunt observations on the immense impact on violent crimes of religion, family, sexual power plays, gender, privacy laws and forensic science. Her heavy-handed summaries almost always wind up finding men directly at the root of the crimes she examines. She culls interrogation transcripts and statements from psychologists, detectives, advocacy-group constituents and family members to buttress her personal conjectures. “Repression gives way to obsession that leads to crime,” she asserts, suggesting that secrets are time bombs waiting to explode and our own hidden lives may not be too far removed from those that gave rise to the atrocities she investigates.
An initially enlightening and informative feminist slant ultimately becomes a predictable, grating agenda.Pub Date: June 5, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-7432-9936-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2007
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
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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