A weird story, luridly related.
The beyond-bizarre life and death of America’s most notorious atheist.
Broadcast journalist Dracos adopts a tabloid-TV style and tough-guy diction (“six-figure bequests came in like trained pigs”) in his rambling, sensational, idiosyncratic account of the rise and fall of the woman many Americans loved to hate. (She was the featured guest on Phil Donahue’s initial show and did not appear on his last only because she’d been murdered by then.) The author begins with the grisly discovery in a remote Texas location of the remains of Madalyn Murray O’Hair, her son, and her granddaughter. Then he returns to the birth in 1919 of Madalyn Elizabeth Mays, who rejected religion as a teenager, served as a WAC in WWII, and changed her name for the first time after she married a man named Roths, only to divorce him when she became pregnant by bomber pilot William Murray. She acquired a law degree—though she never passed the bar, sniffs Dracos—and was enraged to discover there was compulsory prayer in her son’s Baltimore school and filed suit. The US Supreme Court eventually ruled in her favor, banning school prayer, and her career was launched. Dracos charts her steps forward and back, discusses her surprising wealth, her free-spending life, and her flights to avoid prosecution. The author mercilessly depicts his subject’s ballooning weight, her lack of interest in personal hygiene, her abrasive language, her crusty ways. Covering the murder, Dracos depicts the insouciant Austin police as basically uninterested, crediting a young private eye and a couple of journalists for cracking the case. O’Hair’s killer was one of her employees, an ex-con named David Waters, whom she trusted completely. He and his accomplices kidnapped her and her family, held them until they liquidated their assets, then strangled and butchered them. Dracos captures the whole sordid tale in alarmist, colloquial, and crude prose.
A weird story, luridly related.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-2833-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2003
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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