Not groundbreaking scholarship, but a sensible summary of a small-time criminal whose short, violent life became fodder for...
In this objective, non-sensationalistic biography of legendary outlaw Billy the Kid (1859–81), historian Wallis (Pretty Boy, not reviewed, etc.), host of the PBS series American Roads, painstakingly sifts fact from fiction.
The trail of The Kid runs colder each year. A legal tussle even broke out recently over exhuming his mother’s remains to compare the DNA to that of the body beneath The Kid’s tombstone. Following the work of pioneering Western historians such as Frederick Nolan and Robert Utley, Wallis discusses this and other controversies surrounding the desperado (e.g., did he have Hispanic ancestors?) before venturing his own, usually plausible, conclusions. Although variously known as Henry Antrim and William H. Bonney, the outlaw was likely born Henry McCarty to a mother who fled Ireland’s Great Famine of the 1840s. Neither a modern-day Robin Hood nor a cold-blooded killer, The Kid was, suggests Wallis, simply a scrawny ex–New York street urchin forced to live by his wits after the early death of his mother and abandonment by his stepfather. It didn’t help that he came of age during a time when a generation of Civil War veterans, often alcoholic and alienated, had access to a glut of new firearms. For much of his adolescence a junior member of a cattle-rustling outfit, The Kid was puffed up out of all proportion as a leader of a gang of desperadoes by dime-story novelists and journalistic hacks. A gregarious sort who abstained from alcohol, he enjoyed dancing and singing and dealing monte and poker to rubes. To be sure, he had blood on his hands, but, claims Wallis, the number of these deaths was exaggerated. Crucially, the author shows how The Kid got caught up in New Mexico’s Lincoln County War, a conflict of “greed and corruption waged by profiteers, charlatans and hired guns,” where loyalties shifted easily and dangerously. Of more than 50 people indicted during this period, only The Kid was convicted of a crime.
Not groundbreaking scholarship, but a sensible summary of a small-time criminal whose short, violent life became fodder for American myth.Pub Date: March 19, 2007
ISBN: 0-393-06068-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 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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