Englade has a gripping tale of sordid doings in the super-rich world of show horses, but his narrative runs out of steam long before it reaches its conclusion. The complicated tale consists of three different threads: One involves a charming, handsome horse swindler; the second is the unsolved 1977 disappearance of Helen Brach, heiress to the Brach candy fortune; and the third involves the venality of the wealthy who have their show horses murdered in order to collect on the insurance. Englade capably juggles these different tales, which are united through an investigation conducted by Steve Miller, an energetic and ambitious young federal prosecutor in Chicago. Miller, looking for his next big case, is told about Richard Bailey, the swindler who courts wealthy, lonely Chicago women, bleeds them dry by selling them worthless horses at inflated prices, then abandons his victims to their fate. But these fraud cases are only the means to a larger end for Miller: He wants to nail Bailey for the murder, nearly two decades earlier, of Helen Brach, with whom he was known to be friendly. And along the way, Miller uncovers horse hit man Tom Burns, who reveals the greedy, violent underside of the elite show-horse world. Englade has some wonderful characters to work with, including the smooth-talking, cold-hearted Bailey and Brach, who believes she can communicate with the dead through automatic writing. But Englade tells us almost everything we need to know before the trials—the climax of the book—even begin, leaving readers with nothing to learn except the verdicts. And he has a corny way with inventing scenes—which he admits doing ``for dramatic impact based on testimony and interviews.'' Englade might have done better to restrict his tale to one or two of its threads and explore in greater depth the world of wealth of which we get only a glimpse here.
Pub Date: July 25, 1996
ISBN: 0-312-14358-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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