A startling portrayal of life at the frayed edges of the American Dream—of drag shows, transvestite hustlers, teenage hookers, flophouses—and murder most foul. Free-lance writer Bentley centers his narrative on Leslie Douglas Ashley, a flamboyant drag performer who in the early 80's fled Houston for Manhattan. Failing to make it in the Gotham clubs, Ashley, still in drag, took to the streets as a prostitute. Returning to Texas, he encountered Carolyn Ann Lima, a slightly retarded 17-year-old hooker. The two joined forces, servicing clients from schoolboys to traveling salesmen. One of the pair's johns was a local real-estate agent who—according to their later testimony—became threatening during an assignation. Lima pumped six rounds into the man, then helped Ashley drag the body to a nearby vacant lot, where they set it on fire. Taking their victim's car, the two set out for Manhattan, pausing briefly in New Orleans during Mardi Gras. Picked up in N.Y.C. on a minor charge, Ashley and Lima were returned to Texas on murder charges. Ashley was condemned to death, despite an insanity defense; Lima plea- bargained and received time. During an appeal, it became clear that the prosecution had withheld evidence regarding Ashley's mental condition, and, after a new sanity hearing, the transvestite was put in a mental institution. Ashley was eventually pardoned; today, after a sex-change operation, she's politically active as a spokesperson for ACT UP—although Bentley indicates that her abrasive personality goes unappreciated even by that organization. An engrossing look at a shadowy area of American life—and the dark underbelly of the Reagan years. (Eight pages of photographs)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1993
ISBN: 1-55972-180-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Birch Lane Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 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
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
