Here, Egginton (From Cradle to Grave, 1989, etc.) delivers true crime at its best: horrific events, page-turning suspense, fully drawn characters, and a culminating sense of the tragic significance of it all. Egginton's subject is the rampage of Laurie Dann, a deranged young woman who on May 20, 1988, entered the Hubbard Woods elementary school in Winnetka, Ill., and opened fire on classrooms of children, killing one child and severely wounding four others. Dann then fled to a nearby house, shot one of the occupants, and committed suicide. Last year's Murder of Innocence, by Joel Kaplan, George Papajohn, and Eric Zorn, also dealt with this crime, but unlike that book, which focused mainly on Dann's tormented character and history, Egginton's has a more ambitious aim: to describe the effects of the shootings on the people involved, on the entire community of Winnetka, and on the nation. With novelistic fullness, Egginton enters into the lives of the many touched by the violence: teachers, parents, children; the army of policemen, clergy, and social workers called upon to manage the crisis; the medical personnel who treated the dead and wounded children. Common to all was the experience of being shaken on a primal level: The violence against children was an assault on their most basic sense of rightness and sanity. Egginton details the effects on community members: their defensive self-isolation within a ``trauma envelope,'' the need to find a scapegoat and their surprising choices, the elevation of the dead and wounded children and their families to a kind of sainthood. The overall meaning that Egginton distills is that Dann's ``day of fury'' robbed Winnetkans and Americans alike of the illusion that safety is possible in our society, that even with sufficient money, privilege, and vigilance violent crime can be kept away. Penetrating and chilling.
Pub Date: July 15, 1991
ISBN: 0-688-09085-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1991
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
PERSPECTIVES
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
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