A skillfully written, well-informed account of startling real-life crimes by family members.
This true-crime book links a North Carolina man’s violent, homicidal acts to his DNA.
Lukah Chang had a relatively quiet childhood. He and his little sister grew up in a Christian household, where their mother home-schooled them and they helped raise rabbits to sell. So what led this young man to murder Amyjane Brandhagen in a hotel in 2012 and nearly kill another woman a year later? Zacharias argues that a genetic defect may have ignited his brutal behavior. As she explains in this work, scientists have tied a marker, the MAOA gene, to violence. There’s a chance that Chang’s maternal grandfather, Gene Dale Lincoln, passed this gene down. In 1973, Lincoln murdered a woman and later attacked and abducted a 12-year-old Michigan girl, who narrowly escaped. Chang forged a similar path after joining the Marines and befriending a fellow soldier who showed him “enticements” (alcohol) that he seemingly bypassed in his youth. As Chang’s violent urges may have been latent, it was only a matter of time before rage surfaced—the emotion he “felt the most kinship with.” The author provides an extensive, engrossing background for this true account. She devotes pages to such striking developments as Lincoln stalking victims at a campground and Chang entering into a “loveless contract marriage.” There are also copious details about the investigation of Brandhagen’s murder, which involved a prolonged hunt for the culprit and a suspect list that kept growing without any arrests. Zacharias is an exceptional writer and turns her thorough research on genetics into lucid, absorbing chapters. But her argument that Chang’s propensity toward violence was hereditary, while intelligent, isn’t entirely convincing. For example, she notes his drinking and synthetic-marijuana abuse may have exacerbated “compromised DNA,” whereas some readers will speculate those addictions alone may have incited his ferocious acts. In addition, Chang, who’s in prison, and his parents declined to be interviewed for this work, so there may have been telling signs in his childhood or environmental factors that the author never learned about. Still, this book will unquestionably spark a healthy discourse on the titular gene.
A skillfully written, well-informed account of startling real-life crimes by family members.Pub Date: May 10, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64663-648-8
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Koehler Books
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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