A meticulous but flat case is made here for a wrongful first- degree murder conviction. On her 21st birthday, in 1979, Laurencia ``Bambi'' Bembenek entered the Milwaukee police academy. Thus began the chain of events that, according to Radish (Journalism/Univ. of Wisconsin- Milwaukee), ended with Bembenek being framed for murder and receiving a life sentence. Dismissed from the force in her first year, Bembenek filed a discrimination suit against the MPD and married a detective—Elfred Schultz—after a two-month courtship. Soon, she began to suspect Schultz of continuing a relationship with his first wife, Christine—despite the detective's apparent bitter obsession with his having to pay the mortgage on the house that Christine now lived in without him. Within five months of Schultz's marriage to Bembenek, a disguised intruder murdered Christine with a single gunshot while she slept. Although Schultz had means (his off-duty gun was determined to be the murder weapon); motivation (he claimed that alimony and tax support were ruining him); and access (a key to the house), Bembenek was charged and convicted of Christine's murder. Radish details the incompetent defense Bembenek was given by an acquisitive (and later disbarred) attorney. After Bembenek's conviction, many came forth to protest, including a private detective who, working without pay for five years, unearthed evidence of an MPD cover-up. To date, however, Bembenek has been unable to receive a new trial. In 1990, she escaped to Canada, where (although imprisoned) she is petitioning for refugee status from the US. Paper-thin characterizations and minimal backgrounds dull Radish's narrative. Still, the author excels at factual accounts, and this could be grist for a TV movie. (Sixteen pages of photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: March 1, 1992
ISBN: 1-55972-103-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Birch Lane Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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