A fascinating, well-researched story whose telling glimmers rather than glistens.
The sad, instructive saga of a boy hanged in 1892 for a double homicide he committed at age 15.
Brumberg (The Body Project, 1997, etc.) has sunk her spade into a mother lode of information about the alarming case of Charles Miller, an almost archetypal orphan born in 1874 in New York City to a mother who died of consumption when he was five and an alcoholic father who committed suicide. Charley and his three siblings entered the New York Orphan Asylum, where he suffered the humiliation of chronic bedwetting, a condition that did not endear him to the families who took him in. He bounced from one abusive situation to another until he ran off to hop trains. Adopting the moniker “Kansas Charley” (he’d lived briefly in the Cyclone State), the boy learned firsthand the roughness of the road when he was gang-raped by some older men. Later, in Wyoming, he ran into two better-off young men, Waldo Emerson and Ross Fishbaugh, heading west for fun and adventure. They had some kind of falling-out (over alcohol? sex? class conflict?), and one morning while the other two were sleeping, Charley shot and hurriedly robbed them both. Later, penitent, he surrendered in Kansas and was returned to Cheyenne, where he endured a long incarceration (twice escaping), a sensational trial, failed appeals, brief celebrity (his jailers gave the press virtually free access, and he penned his own accounts, sometimes in pathetic verse), and death by hanging before 60 witnesses. Brumberg (Women’s Studies/Cornell) appends a chapter containing familiar arguments against executing juveniles, including some cautionary words about such contemporary incidents as the Columbine shootings and the DC sniper attacks. Authorial clichés—twice the case reminds her of a hot potato—and an overall lack of craft diminish the narrative’s power.
A fascinating, well-researched story whose telling glimmers rather than glistens.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-670-03228-X
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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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