A riveting reminder of the high cost of justice being served in a place where the supposedly good guys were...
Two veteran Chicago reporters spin a searing tale of mobster crime and official corruption, vividly detailing how a witness for the prosecution sees his life fall apart when pay-offs pervert the judicial system.
As much a cautionary tale about the realities of the Witness Protection Program as a gripping narrative of pervasive corruption, Possley and Kogan first review the history of the Chicago Mafia and its continuing power even in the 1970s and ’80s. The authors then introduce the two protagonists, Harry Aleman, a mob hit man and model father, and Bob Lowe, a working man devoted to his family, who happened to witness a murder. In 1972, on Chicago’s West Side, on his way to visit neighbor Billy Logan, who was interested in buying Lowe’s dog Ginger, Bob saw a car idling in the street and then, as Billy emerged from his house, shots were fired, and he saw Billy die. As Ginger bounded to the car, Bob followed and there saw Harry with a gun. Bob, escaping further gunshots, ran away. Though his father counseled him not to, Bob insisted on going to the police and there identified Harry from a book of mugshots. Nothing happened, but in 1976, an Assistant State Attorney, concerned with the rising number of gangland slayings, decided to prosecute Harry. The police tracked down Bob, who again offered to testify. He was now advised, with his wife Fran and their children, to adopt new names and enter the Witness Protection Program—a bumblingly executed and insensitive exercise that nearly destroyed the family as they were repeatedly forced to move and Bob found he couldn’t get work. Bob appeared in court, was humiliated by the aggressive defense, and in a glaring miscarriage of justice, watched as Harry went free. While mob money and muscle protected Harry over the next 20 years, Bob became an alcoholic, served time himself, recovered, and in 1997 testified as Harry was again tried for the murder of Billy Logan.
A riveting reminder of the high cost of justice being served in a place where the supposedly good guys were indistinguishable from the villains.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-399-14810-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2001
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
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
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