Occasionally uneven, but overall an impressive investigative work with interesting findings that tend to contradict...
A radio journalist immerses herself in the lives of five murderers incarcerated in San Quentin State Prison in California.
NPR reporter and producer Mullane received remarkable cooperation from the prison staff as well as her subjects as they sought parole for good behavior and changed character. Though the parole process is long and complex, the decisions can be overturned by the governor without detailed explanation. However, for obvious reasons, most governors tend to reject parole requests from murderers even when prison officials and parole board members favor release. Mullane was surprised to learn that of the approximately 1,000 convicted murderers paroled in California in the last 21 years, not one has murdered again. The accounts of the five prisoners—Don Cronk, Ed Ramirez, Rich Rael, Phillip Seiler and Jesse Reed—interweave throughout the book, making the narrative difficult to track at times. The author examines their young lives before the murders, the circumstances of their crimes, their prison terms and their attempts to readjust to the world outside prison. She recounts interviews with family members, lovers and friends, but does not approach those close to the murder victims, a conscious editorial decision that certainly spared suffering for those loved ones but detracts from the book's emotional impact. Nonetheless, Mullane demonstrates clearly that each of the five men was to some extent a caring person who made a terrible decision on an especially bad day and has spent years trying to sincerely atone for the murder. The author believes in rehabilitation and second chances, and her accounts are unusual in their optimism about inmates living productively behind bars and after their release.
Occasionally uneven, but overall an impressive investigative work with interesting findings that tend to contradict conventional wisdom.Pub Date: June 26, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-61039-029-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2012
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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