From Hammer (The Helmsleys, 1990; The CBS Murders, 1987, etc.), a scrupulously detailed account of a teenaged girl, her boyfriend, and the murder of her mother. Joyce Aparo was everything a murder victim shouldn't be: popular with her co-workers, known by everyone in her hometown of Glastonbury, Connecticut, and a highly competent career woman. She was also, secretly, everything a parent shouldn't be. She beat her only child, Karin, from the time the girl was three; forbade her to play with other children; forced her to dress as a miniature version of herself; and insisted she was a violin prodigy (during one recital, Aparo ran on stage screaming at Karin and dragged her off). Karin grew up with bulimia, anorexia nervosa, a suicide attempt, and post-traumatic stress syndrome. At 16, she met Dennis Coleman, 18—tall and red-haired with a splash of freckles, IQ 137, well bred and well spoken. After a few dates, the two were making love every chance they got, planning a honeymoon in Vienna, and progressing to sex with handcuffs and dildos. Coleman became completely obsessed with Karin, writing her every day (even when he saw her) and worshiping at ``my Karin shrine''—photos, flowers, and memorabilia of Karin covering every wall of his bedroom. Did they plot together to kill Joyce Aparo? (Karin had already tried to give her mother an overdose of Seconal.) Was Coleman acting on his own, as Karin maintained from the day she was arrested? Or was Coleman so compelled by passion that he could not resist anything Karin asked? How he came to strangle Joyce Aparo and the part that Karin played in the murder form the tangled plexus here. Hammer provides meticulous research—extensive diary entries, correspondence, psychiatric profiles, and verbatim trial testimony—in producing a solid but slowly paced and grim illustration that ``violent loves have violent ends.'' Not for sensitive souls. (Eight pages of b&w photos—not seen.)
Pub Date: March 23, 1992
ISBN: 0-688-09479-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1992
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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