A captivating assemblage of New York crime stories but awkwardly delivered.
A public defense attorney recalls the most peculiar (and gruesome) of the cases he’s encountered.
After college, debut author Siracusa meandered professionally. He had an aborted stint in the Marines and worked for Brooks Brothers as well for the U.S. Public Health Service as an epidemiologist tracking venereal disease in New York City in the 1960s. (He found plenty.) In 1969, he started evening classes at New York Law School and landed a job as a paralegal at the Legal Aid Society working under the mercurial mentorship of a lawyer who specialized in post-conviction remedies. Eventually licensed to practice law both in Washington, D.C., and New York, he largely worked in the latter and amassed an impressively eventful career brimming with the kinds of cases that demonstrate the chaos of the city in its criminal heyday. The stories are as remarkable as they are macabre. The author defended a racist serial killer dubbed the “Midtown Slasher” by attempting to establish his insanity. In another case, a mortgage lender was kidnapped and tortured by a man to whom he refused a loan, a grizzly act of delusional malice. Many of the stories are achingly sad: A Vietnam veteran—emotionally ravaged by PTSD and traumatized by an abusive childhood—murdered his older brother. The author intelligently reflects not only on the city’s manic dysfunction, but also on the failings of judicial process, a bureaucratic maze run by incompetent factotums and petty tyrants. Despite the often grisly nature of the anecdotes, Siracusa relates them with humor and a wry sense of irony. The author displays a keen eye for the eccentricities of human nature and had a front-row seat to the expression of its vagaries. The prose, however, can be ungainly and stiff: “In an attempt to significantly reduce length of time to relate the story of the defecation dilemma, I will leave my magazines and newspapers in another room as I enter the toilet to tell my story unencumbered by reading materials.”
A captivating assemblage of New York crime stories but awkwardly delivered.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4809-5449-6
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Dorrance Publishing Co.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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
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