Terrifying, engrossing, inspirational and surprisingly funny.
Former Philadelphia Inquirer and Miami Herald reporter Capuzzo (Close to Shore: A True Story of Terror in an Age of Innocence, 2001, etc.) reveals the inner workings of the mysterious Vidocq Society, a team of celebrated forensic investigators that regularly meets to tackle unsolved murder cases that have stymied conventional homicide-detection techniques.
The heart of the Society consists of William Fleisher, an avuncular former federal agent with a gift for networking; Richard Walter, a prickly and brilliant profiler obsessed with plumbing the depths of the murderous mind; and Frank Bender, a master forensic sculptor of seemingly supernatural talents. These men and their cohorts have proven a devastatingly effective team, solving scores of seemingly hopeless cold cases through a combination of experience, dogged passion for justice and shared sets of obscure and highly specialized skills. The book intrigues and disgusts in equal measure with its graphically detailed descriptions of the most depraved murders imaginable, and the material might be unbearable without the fantastic successes of the brilliant detectives who bring the malefactors to justice. Bender and Walter are an irresistibly entertaining team. The cadaverous, supercilious Walter, chain-smoking in ascetic contemplation in his Victorian manse, contrasts deliciously with Bender, a voluble, compulsive womanizer who balances a hedonistic approach to life with an uncanny instinct for accurately visualizing complete, detailed faces based on the slimmest fragments of forensic evidence. The case of John List, an upright churchgoer who murdered his entire family before disappearing for some 18 years, demonstrates the weird and potent chemistry shared by the sleuths. Walter developed a startlingly accurate profile of List, determining the area in which he was hiding, the work he did, the car he drove and his manner of dress. Bender created a bust depicting the changes to List’s appearance that had occurred during the intervening years. Both men were dead on the money, and List was caught—but the Vidocq members couldn’t stop sniping over whose idea it had been to add heavy horn-rim glasses to the bust. With these men, the details are everything.
Terrifying, engrossing, inspirational and surprisingly funny.Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-592-40142-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2010
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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