Casts intriguing new light on a famous unsolved mystery. (8 pp. b&w photos, not seen)
The life and colorful times of a New York State Supreme Court justice who went missing one warm August evening in 1930.
Ever since, numerous magazine articles and many book chapters have contemplated the celebrated case of Joseph Force Crater, but this appears to be the first book entirely devoted to the classic mystery since his widow’s unsurprisingly partial account in 1961. Given the paucity of available evidence, Wall Street Journal assistant publisher Tofel has chosen to focus on the political history behind Crater’s disappearance, painting a mordant picture of the fading Tammany machine and the judge’s place in it as they “approached the vanishing point together.” In 1930, Jimmy Walker was Mayor of Broadway (and only incidentally of the rest of the city), FDR was governor of the Empire State, and the price of a seat on the bench was approximately a year’s judicial salary. This was the world from which Crater suddenly vanished, not long after making large withdrawals of cash that his wife discovered some weeks later in their New York apartment. The judge was last seen on Wednesday, August 6, after dinner with some acquaintances, headed for a musical show. His wife was at their home upstate. Without a telephone, she wasn’t immediately concerned when she did not hear from her husband. After some time, however, she concluded that he was murdered, or at least so she claimed to the insurance company. Tofel, less certain of foul play, offers a plausible alternative involving madam Polly Adler. The judge was declared dead in 1939, and the case was closed by the NYPD in 1979 after a fruitless half-century. Tofel’s surmise about what happened to Judge Crater would explain why his disappearance wasn’t investigated terribly vigorously.
Casts intriguing new light on a famous unsolved mystery. (8 pp. b&w photos, not seen)Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2004
ISBN: 1-56663-605-1
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Ivan Dee/Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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