A literary tapestry of true crime, memoir and personal essay that simultaneously enthralls and disturbs.
A stint as a juror leads, many years later, to a relationship with a convicted killer.
In 1978, the murder of Larry Hasker rocked peaceful Honolulu, his body found just 25 feet from a highway. At the time, Kansas-born Spalding, recently married to a photographer and living in Honolulu, read about the crime in the paper. Four years later, she became an alternate juror in the murder trial of young Maryann Acker. Hasker was one of two victims in a crime spree; Maryann’s husband William had already been convicted of killing the other, Cesario Arauza. In a bizarre twist, William was a prosecution witness in the case against Maryann, predictably foisting responsibility onto her. Spalding noted numerous anomalies in the proceedings and felt an affinity for Maryann, only 18 at the time of the crime. On the last day of the trial, Spalding arrived late and was abruptly dismissed. Shortly thereafter, she moved to Toronto and thought little of Maryann until a decade later, when she came upon her notes from the trial. After a little digging, she was amazed to learn that Maryann was still in prison and contacted her. (In the meantime, Spalding had become a critically acclaimed novelist and scholar (Mere, 2001, etc.), now married to Booker Prize–winning author Michael Ondaatje.) Spalding’s research supplements letters from Maryann about her early years and recent struggles, and snippets of news articles and transcripts pepper the narrative. The author also fleshes out Maryann’s story before prison as well as her efforts to gain release. Short, elegantly written chapters find Spalding examining her own life through the prism of Maryann’s, with ruminations on family and love and the details of everyday living.
A literary tapestry of true crime, memoir and personal essay that simultaneously enthralls and disturbs.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-375-42476-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2007
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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