With an occasional lapse into a breast-beating aside, Jackson ably depicts a culture bent on fencing in men as well as...
An exciting, fast-paced account of crime and punishment at the close of the American frontier.
While researching his book Dead Run (1999), an account of prison escapee Dennis Stockton, freelance journalist Jackson happened across the tale of Frank Grigware. Sentenced in 1909 to life imprisonment in Leavenworth, Grigware hijacked a supply train with a group of inmates, and successfully avoided recapture for the next 25 years. Jackson confesses that at first he wasn’t enthusiastic about following Grigware’s trail, not wanting “to devote more years to yet another prison saga.” Fans of true crime will be glad that he did, though, for besides charting Grigware’s curious career and still more curious retirement, Jackson does a fine job of summarizing the West’s none too admirable record in preventing and punishing crime, which was all too common in a country where alcoholism and madness were epidemic. As with Stockton, Jackson tends to explain away Grigware’s alleged crimes, which ranged from petty thievery to train robbery (or, at the very least, hanging out with train robbers, a pastime that western lawmen did their best to discourage). Unlucky and perhaps a little stupid, Grigware got caught, did a little of his time, broke free, and vanished, leaving a dim trail across the Northwest and eventually settling in the mountains of British Columbia, where, having changed his name, he became a solid citizen and good neighbor. When his true identity was discovered years later, Grigware successfully fought extradition in a legal brouhaha that took years and involved Depression-era figures such as J. Edgar Hoover, Secretary of State Cordell Hull, and Attorney General Homer Cummings. In his closing pages, Jackson depicts a Grigware old, ill, and a little bewildered by the flood of Americans—this time fleeing the draft—into his adopted country.
With an occasional lapse into a breast-beating aside, Jackson ably depicts a culture bent on fencing in men as well as rangeland.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2001
ISBN: 0-7867-0897-2
Page Count: 432
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
