A routine tip about an ``interesting lawsuit'' leads two Ohio reporters to a multimillion-dollar insurance scam: a pulsing tale of murder, false identities, drugs, and sex. When Melvin Hanson, 46, allegedly collapsed and died at his doctor's office in Glendale, California, in April 1988, it entitled John Hawkins, his partner in the Just Sweats clothing stores, to a $1-million payoff. The Farmers Insurance Co. paid the young Columbus, Ohio, businessman but later filed suit, claiming that it wasn't Hanson who'd died in Richard Boggs's office. Columbus Dispatch reporters Yocum and Candisky tenaciously followed their leads from Las Vegas to New York to California despite a lack of interest by the Glendale police, who considered the death from ``natural causes'' a closed case. The high-rolling Hawkins—a former ``male prostitute,'' according to his mother—disappeared after getting the insurance check, leaving a company awash in rumors of embezzlement by both partners. As the reporters learned, Hanson had variously claimed to be dying of AIDS or a heart condition when he left for California. He allegedly took $2 million from the 22-store chain when he departed in January—but he also changed his will to make Hawkins his beneficiary. When the coroner's report suggested that Boggs ``may have sexually assaulted...the decedent,'' Yocum and Candisky knew the story would go beyond simple embezzlement and insurance fraud. It also helped spur official interest, leading to the discovery that the dead man was actually an alcoholic drifter whom Boggs had met at a nightclub. Boggs was convicted of murder and is now serving life, while Hanson, who turned up alive, and Hawkins, who was extradited from Italy, are awaiting trail on murder charges. The third-person narration is a little self-conscious at times, but it lends this wild story an urgency that serves it well: a good prospect for true-crime fans. (Photo insert—not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 15, 1993
ISBN: 0-87975-842-2
Page Count: 255
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1993
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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