A fascinating and wildly informative dive into the mysterious world of death and decay.
Grisly true-life cases from the longtime career of a veteran coroner.
In his previous books, Bay Area writer Bateson (The Last and Greatest Battle: Finding the Will, Commitment, and Strategy to End Military Suicides, 2015) explored the act and aftermath of suicides. Here, he presents a profile of Ken Holmes, whom he’d met in 2010 after interviewing him for a book on Golden Gate bridge jumpers. Holmes spent nearly four decades working in the Marin County coroner’s office investigating not just suicides, but also countless unsolved homicides as well as natural, accidental, and undetermined deaths. Bateson reviewed 800 files in his research, and the cases he meticulously describes vividly represent Holmes’ long-standing tenure as a forensic professional. Each situation is riveting and complex. Holmes remarks that while a coroner’s purpose is to “find answers for the living,” it is the noncelebrity cases—he has handled the deaths of Jerry Garcia, Tupac Shakur, and the Trailside Killer, among others—that emerge as the most memorable, some drawn out over multiple decades. Through interviews, Bateson retraces the retired coroner’s history from his first homicide report through his years of learning the forensic skills of the trade; particularly compelling chapters focus on Holmes’ stint in San Quentin prison and the phenomenon of Golden Gate bridge suicides. Throughout the book, the author spotlights each gory detail with macabre precision. Holmes intimately describes the inescapable odor of a decaying corpse (“the odor stays with you for days no matter how many times you shower”), the processes of lividity, rigor mortis, and autopsies, the atrocities of child abuse, and the deadly consequences of autoerotic asphyxiation. These factual narratives magnify the work and the resolve necessary to bring closure to violent, unjust, suspicious, or unresolved deaths. They also make for supremely entertaining reading material for anyone with a dark curiosity in forensic science.
A fascinating and wildly informative dive into the mysterious world of death and decay.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6822-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
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.
