An enthralling true-life Cinderella story—that drips blood all over the glass slipper. Lindsey (A Gathering of Saints, 1988, etc.) again shows his mastery of true crime, revealing the horror of his fractured fairy tale bit by tantalizing bit. Cinderella is California-girl Monika Zumsteg, sunny and vivacious despite growing up with an alcoholic dad. Prince Charming is Michael Telling, a mysterious British tourist who sweeps Monika off her feet and into a near-instant betrothal. Traveling with Michael to England, Monika learns that her fiancÇ is not, as he's claimed, a British secret agent—but, rather, heir to the billionaire Vesteys (whose family history Lindsey recounts at tedious length); moreover, he's married, with a young son. Despite the lies, Monika decides to proceed with the marriage once Michael divorces. But when at last luxuriously settled into a small English town, Monika finds her dream mutating into nightmare as Michael begins to explode into wild rages—rages, she learns, that stem from his abandonment as a child and that once compelled him to set fire to his boarding school. Despairing, Monika takes to drink, extramarital sex, and hounding Michael to change his ways; so he shoots her dead and cuts off her head- -spinning the narrative from sordid melodrama into tight police procedural as Scotland Yard, sifting clues, eventually nabs Michael. The narrative spins again, into riveting courtroom drama, as an indignant Lindsey details how the British justice system- -along with the raving British tabloid press—allows the trial to turn into an indictment of Monika's character, and allows Michael to try to slip through the loophole of an insanity plea. Starts slow but gains tremendous force, winding up—despite Lindsey's customary pedestrian prose—as a tale both dark and deep, haunted by familial and societal curses. And it'll make a great movie. (Eight pages of b&w photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-671-68069-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
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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