Suspenseful, behind-closed-doors account of the legal and medical maneuverings that enabled deviously ingenuous killer Ross Michael Carlson to avoid trial from 1983—the year he shot both his parents to death—until his own death in 1989. Weissberg, head of the psychiatric department of Colorado State Hospital, was a prosecution witness in the case. Soon after the killings, irrefutable evidence surfaced that linked Carlson, 19, to the murders. The alibi he had concocted with a gullible school chum crumbled, and, eventually, his bag containing the murder weapon, the floor mat for the Cadillac used in the slayings, surgical gloves, and other incriminating items was discovered. Placed under medical observation, Carlson convinced a series of examining psychiatrists that he was suffering from Multiple Personality Disorder—``the current psychiatric rage'' in 1983, according to Weissberg. The killer claimed to have seven separate personalities inhabiting his psyche: It was supposedly the one named ``Antichrist'' who had pumped two bullets into his parents' heads. Weissberg contends that the accused—hiring one of Colorado's most successful and flamboyant defense lawyers—made a mockery of the criminal-justice system, thanks largely to the efforts of defense psychiatrists and to judges who were intimidated by their ``expert'' testimony: The author's scorn for these legal and medical ``hired guns'' is palpable. After five years, Carlson was found competent to stand trial; but by then, ironically, it was discovered that he had contracted leukemia and had only months to live. Weissberg keeps the narrative moving briskly and without scientific jargon, stumbling only in some strained, nearly pseudomystical speculations about Carlson's motives. Overall: an eye-opening report, told with unusual frankness and a great deal of righteous anger. (Sixteen pages of b&w photographs-not seen.)
Pub Date: July 7, 1992
ISBN: 0-385-30536-2
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1992
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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