Behn (Seven Silent Men, 1984, etc.) reopens a celebrated criminal case—the kidnap/murder of Charles A. Lindbergh's infant son—and renders plausible if conjectural verdicts startlingly at odds with those on the official record. So far as history is concerned, an illegal German alien named Bruno Richard Hauptmann snatched the revered aviator's firstborn from the family's New Jersey estate on the night of March 1, 1932, and, though he killed the child almost immediately, collected a $50,000 ransom. When arrested in N.Y.C. over two years later, Hauptmann was found to possess much of the ransom; tried and convicted on homicide charges, he was executed on April 3, 1936. But here—drawing on hitherto unknown evidence unearthed by the Garden State's Republican governor (a political foe of Hauptmann's prosecutor) during the appeal process, as well as on government archives and other sources—Behn tells a different story. Toward the close of his inquiry (which provides vividly detailed perspectives on the times as well as the places in which the tragedy unfolded), the author makes a credible case against an individual who had the means, motive, and opportunity to kill the baby three days earlier than the murder was previously believed to have occurred. Prior to this shocker, he identifies the rogue who most likely wrote a series of ransom notes, and makes a fine job of sorting out the roles played by the sordid drama's large supporting cast—including John F. Condon, J. Edgar Hoover, Gaston Means, H. Norman Schwarzkopf (father of the Desert Storm general), et al. Throughout, Behn speculates that Lindbergh himself may have masterminded a sophisticated coverup that threw police off the track of the real murderer. At a minimum, the author argues, Hauptmann (whose trial he deems a travesty) was guilty of nothing worse than extortion. While his well-founded suspicions are not beyond all doubt, Behn's conclusions are reasonable and responsible in the circumstances—and are bound to attract considerable attention. True-crime fare, then, of a compellingly high order.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-87113-544-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1993
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
PERSPECTIVES
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
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