by Karen Spears Zacharias ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 10, 2022
A skillfully written, well-informed account of startling real-life crimes by family members.
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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
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by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
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The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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SEEN & HEARD
by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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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