The writing in this terrifying tale is neither sophisticated nor nuanced, but the facts—presented bravely and unstintingly—are powerful. This is the closest thing imaginable to a modern-day slave narrative: the story of a woman basically imprisoned by a brutal repeat attacker and by an impotent and incompetent police force. Divorced and living alone with her young daughter, Skalias was first raped in 1977 by Lanny Gene Bevers Jr., a man she had known glancingly through his brother, who had done some yard work for her husband. Despite the rapist's threats that if she went to the police he would kill her and her daughter, Skalias identified him. She methodically recounts the steps leading up to the trial, including Bevers's extradition from Germany, where he was serving in the military, and her own lie detector test, taken in order to ``prove'' that she was raped; one officer offhandedly comments that this is the first rape he's ever heard of that didn't involve ejaculation. Finally, Bevers's fingerprints on the window he had broken to enter her house led to a 20-year prison sentence. Assured that the parole board would alert her before releasing Bevers, Skalias was shocked to awaken one night seven years later and find him standing in her bedroom with a stocking over his head. The second rape was even more brutal; Bevers severed her thumb and beat her beyond recognition. Despite her insistence that she recognized Bevers and his methods, the police almost forced her to implicate another suspect when she was heavily sedated. Meanwhile, Bevers began to make increasingly threatening phone calls to Skalias. The reproduction of transcripts of those calls is one example of the straight-on tactics used here in a constant emotional assault by Skalias and Davis, former Tarrant County district attorney's victim assistance coordinator. Skalias has since been relocated and given a new identity; her story is being made into an ABC TV movie. Frightening and enlightening. (16 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 20, 1994
ISBN: 1-56530-146-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
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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