This meticulously researched account of a fatal love affair carefully questions the nature of guilt and capital punishment...
An exhaustive look into the passionate love affair that led to one of the most infamous murders in 1920s England.
Moving beyond the standard courtroom drama, Somerset Maugham Award winner Thompson (Agatha Christie: A Mysterious Life, 2018, etc.) painstakingly details the life and death of Edith Thompson, an Essex woman who gained notoriety in 1922 as she and her lover stood trial for the murder of her husband. The secret romance between Edith and Freddy Bywaters captivated and shocked a nation, as her love letters were introduced as evidence during their trial. For more than a year, Edith had cherished what few precious moments she could spend alone with her younger lover. The bulk of the narrative focuses on these brief trysts as described in Edith’s writing, although the chronology of events becomes a bit knotted as the story reaches its tragic end. There was little doubt of Bywaters' guilt when he was accused of fatally stabbing Edith's husband, but as the intimate details of her affair became public, her role in the death of her husband was called into question. Although never intended for an audience, Edith’s love letters, which “were perceived to redefine the concept of shamelessness,” earned her lasting notoriety while also sealing her fate. Female sexuality, adultery, abortion: Edith wrote honestly about the issues affecting her and many other women but were deemed too taboo to discuss openly. As elaborately chronicled by the author, who displays a profound sympathy for her subject, Edith's own words were enough to condemn her in the court of public opinion well before she was sentenced to death in a court of law.
This meticulously researched account of a fatal love affair carefully questions the nature of guilt and capital punishment in polite society, offering up a more profound lesson than is likely to be found in a typical true crime novel.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68177-871-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
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 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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
