A bleak but thoughtful look at the curse of urban violence, both its causalities and its long-term effects.
A shocking tale of a mistaken-identity multiple murder and its aftermath.
Retired NFL All-Pro cornerback Alexander’s life story would be compelling on its own merits, without the disturbing tragedy at the center of this memoir. In 1984, as crack and gangs were overwhelming South Central Los Angeles, gunmen invaded the home of Alexander’s mother, killing her, Alexander’s sister, and two boys. Beyond his own anguish, the author notes how the crime’s “extreme nature shocked even the calloused inhabitants of South Central.” Although Alexander contemplated a vigilante hunt for the perpetrators, the investigation soon pinpointed several members of the Rolling Sixties gang, one of whom passed a note to a co-defendant following their arrest that was practically a confession. With three gangsters convicted and two sentenced to death, Alexander was left to brood on the case’s unanswered questions; supposedly, the killers were hired to attack the plaintiff in a lawsuit stemming from a bar brawl, yet they went to the wrong house. “Every detail had to align, fall just so, to produce this tragedy,” writes the author. While co-authors Gerould and Snipes (Criminal Justice/San Francisco State Univ.) bring an authoritative voice to the story’s legal and investigative aspects, Alexander lends gravity to his tale of personal tragedy by looking for broader narratives. He dramatizes his family history, noting that his parents’ generation fled Jim Crow for a middle-class life in LA, a promise eroded by segregation and crime. While castigating South Central’s gang culture for its nihilistic violence, he also notes its historical roots in racist “street terrorism, in addition to the governmental tactic of restrictive housing covenants.” Despite his anger, Alexander shows remarkable empathy by investigating the killers’ forsaken childhoods and lives in prison. Finally, observing, “I had gone from professional athlete to professional victim,” the author concludes by discussing his adoption of five Haitian orphans, a difficult ordeal with a more positive outcome.
A bleak but thoughtful look at the curse of urban violence, both its causalities and its long-term effects.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-6576-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
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
SEEN & HEARD
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