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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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