A valiant but ultimately unsatisfying attempt to answer an urgent question.
The antecedents and consequences of some of America’s most famous—and horrifying—killings.
In his nonfiction debut, Fast (Social Work/Yeshiva Univ.) explores the phenomenon known as school rampage. He offers an in-depth, two-chapter exploration of the slaughter committed at Columbine High School by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, and also details some massacres now less well-remembered. We’re reminded of kids like Brenda Spencer, a petite 16-year-old who in 1979 opened fire on an elementary school; Wayne Lo, the 19-year-old Taiwanese prodigy who killed a classmate and a professor and wounded several others at Simon’s Rock College in 1992; and quiet Luke Woodham, who in 1997 killed his mother before heading to school with a hunting rifle. Though he provides detailed and thoroughly researched descriptions of the events leading up to these and other killings, as well as of the murders themselves, Fast also irresponsibly offers remote diagnoses of the school shooters based on media reports, in several cases turning mere speculation into psychological diagnosis. He gives grossly oversimplified explanations of psychological outcomes: for example, that an eight-year-old victim of Spencer’s later became a drug addict as a direct result of the injuries she sustained during the shooting. The formula from trauma to pathology is rarely so simple, as can be seen by the fact that the school shooters often have no good explanation for their actions. Many children are bullied and teased by their peers, as most of the rampagers appear to have been, but few progress to homicide. Harboring violent fantasies, struggling with parental expectations and experiencing the heartache of being unceremoniously dumped are likewise not exactly unusual events during adolescence. While Fast does an excellent job of revealing what these broken children had in common, he is less apt at explaining what made them different.
A valiant but ultimately unsatisfying attempt to answer an urgent question.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59020-047-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2008
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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