The childhood memories are great fun; the crime reporting workmanlike; the portrait of the adult relationships touching.
Smith (Love Her Madly, 2002, etc.) intertwines delightful stories from childhood with a grim chronicle of a sexual predator whose murder of the author’s grade-school classmate has haunted her for decades.
By alternating chapters on the pedophile stalker’s sorry life with chapters on her youthful past, Smith creates almost unbearable tension as she makes the reader wait for the two stories’ lines to intersect. Her vivid account of growing up in a working-class Italian Catholic neighborhood in Hartford, Conn., is filled with memorable characters: besides a raft of close relatives, there’s her indifferent mother, perpetually “on the verge of a nervous breakdown,” her hardworking, distracted father and her autistic older brother, who chews on his arm if he hears noise, cannot bear the color red or the word “Thursday” and is fixated on World War II—he advises the White House via his Campbell’s soup-can phone. As the normal kid sister, Smith is largely overlooked, gulping swigs of Hershey syrup for her breakfast before dashing off to school. In fifth grade, everything changes when Bob Malm abducts and strangles 11-year-old Irene a few blocks from Smith’s house. Adults try to protect the children through silence, telling them nothing, keeping newspapers from them and forbidding them to discuss Irene. Smith says her memories of the next two-and-a-half years are blank. Years later, when she is an established writer, she includes Irene’s story in an essay for a Hartford literary journal that triggers a call from Irene’s brother and launches her on a quest to, as she puts it, “build a memorial to Irene.” From newspapers and court records, which she quotes extensively, she garners details of Malm’s life, of his trial and appeal and even his execution, an electrocution that went awry. The reader may not know Irene better, but Smith, who gives only glimpses of her own life after fifth grade, illuminates Malm.
The childhood memories are great fun; the crime reporting workmanlike; the portrait of the adult relationships touching.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-7977-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2005
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 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.
