Of modest interest to students of world politics and fans of true crime. Then again, given the Talk Miramax imprimatur, they...
A careful, if sometimes plodding, reconstruction of the regicide/parricide/suicide that captured the world’s attention for a moment or two last summer.
British journalist and travel-writer Gregson makes much of a centuries-old prophecy that promised the Shah dynasty of Nepal would be rubbed out in its tenth generation. Just that happened when, in the midst of a raging war between the royal army and indigenous Maoist guerrillas, Crown Prince Dipendra donned camouflage, strapped on machine guns, and slaughtered his parents and siblings. He did so, it appears, out of disappointment that his mother and father disapproved of his intention to marry a commoner and had threatened to cut off his allowance. A fat boy who loved pizza, Gregson tells us, Dipendra hated failure and let few obstacles stand in his way; he was also notoriously fond of drugs and drink, which he justified as necessary to “de-stress,” and showed signs of mental illness. Warned by an English tutor that his boy was about to pop, King Birendra chose to believe that Dipendra would come around—a fatal error, as the nation would discover. Gregson sometimes lays on the details a little thick: “[The Queen’s] skull was blown apart and most of her brains scattered over a wide area. Fragments of brain tissue, jawbone, and teeth, the red tika she had placed on her forehead, her ear-pins and broken red glass bangles, were found in different places around where she fell.” At the same time, his prose is strangely lackluster, given the dramatic events he depicts. Still, Gregson does a good job of making comprehensible odd events in a distant land and explaining their implications, including the possible loss of Nepal to the very Maoists the king was fighting.
Of modest interest to students of world politics and fans of true crime. Then again, given the Talk Miramax imprimatur, they might want to wait for the movie.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7868-6878-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2002
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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