The subject matter is explosive and informed by good reporting, but the various narrative lines never really tie together,...
An illumination of the Washington, D.C., crack epidemic.
As a reporter for the Washington Post, Castaneda undoubtedly learned that it can be trouble when a journalist gets too close to his story and even more trouble when the journalist becomes the story. Yet the author, drawing heavily on his experience and reportage in the crack and murder capital of the country, compounds those troubles by pacing his multiple narratives as if writing a novel (re-creating the thoughts of characters in situations he wasn’t even around to witness) or TV series. The most dramatic narrative is the author’s own story, that of someone who was already using crack when he was brought from Los Angeles to the Post to cover crime and quickly escalated into full-blown addiction as the drug became both his beat and his life. The paper sent him to rehab, and he dedicated himself to recovery (after one serious slip); that part of the narrative pretty much disappears halfway through the book. The second narrative concerns the rise and fall of the city’s homicide chief, caught in the political machinations of Mayor Marion Berry’s regime, who became not only a major source for the reporter, but also a closer friend than the subject of a journalist’s coverage should be. Such a close relationship had consequences for both men. The third narrative concerns a minister who built a street church in the middle of a crack-dealing neighborhood and found the head dealer to be a guardian angel protecting the church—“a lovable teddy bear,” or, as one neighbor put it, “the notorious, lovable godfather.” Castaneda interweaves that narrative with the immediacy of the others, though he later explains that he experienced none of this firsthand but only learned of the preacher and the dealer after the fact.
The subject matter is explosive and informed by good reporting, but the various narrative lines never really tie together, and the novelistic approach undermines the journalism.Pub Date: July 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62040-004-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
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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