A fascinating journey into an enigmatic case and equally elusive parent.
An Orange County woman details her four-year investigation into the violent death of her mother in Mexico in this debut memoir.
On March 15, 2006, Taylor received word from her sister that their mother, Jane Kling, had been missing for several days. While Taylor wasn’t surprised since “Mom had checked out of her life before, without much regard for our feelings, and then returned without explanation,” Kling hadn’t asked anyone to look after her dogs, and she had just opened her own business. Taylor had kept aloof from her four times–married mother in recent months, but she initiated a missing person campaign, and the Mexican police contacted the family a week later. Kling’s partially undressed corpse, with evidence of physical (but not sexual) assault, had been found in a remote part of Baja, and her van and valuables weren’t taken. Navigating Mexican and California police bureaucracies, Taylor fought to keep the case open and solicited the help of former FBI profiler Candice DeLong and forensic pathologist Michael Baden to review the investigation and autopsy photos that she managed to acquire. Four years later, Taylor was able to help close the case on how her mother died—although certain mysteries remain. Taylor’s debut memoir is a gripping account of her diligent search for answers. Kling is a highly memorable, colorful “ghost” presence throughout the account; various red herrings reveal that Taylor’s mother likely had been living some kind of double, secret, or at the very least compartmentalized life. A particularly dramatic moment is Taylor’s astonishment, upon viewing her mother’s corpse, that Kling had a “porno-belt” of flower tattoos in her pelvic area plus recently put similar markings across her breasts. Some of Taylor’s narrative strands, such as the appearance of a woman who claimed to have been Kling’s best friend, are not fully wrapped up. Still, such open-endedness rather suits this story, an evocative tale of seeking, if not getting, complete closure.
A fascinating journey into an enigmatic case and equally elusive parent.Pub Date: May 12, 2015
ISBN: 978-1590792698
Page Count: 256
Publisher: SelectBooks
Review Posted Online: April 22, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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