True crime and human perseverance merge in this engrossing chronicle of a small-town atrocity.
A chilling examination of the 2007 slaughter of a Connecticut family and how the sole survivor carried on.
In a book expanded from a series of riveting Esquire feature articles, Popular Mechanics editor-in-chief D’Agostino narrates the story of Dr. William Petit, a prominent New England endocrinologist, and his close-knit household, which was shattered by a 2007 home invasion. In gripping, dramatic prose, the author intricately describes how two armed men stormed the Petit home, beat William, and tied him to a pole in the basement. The men robbed and then strangled his wife, assaulted both daughters, and set the house ablaze. Though wholly devastated, Petit remained a silent and bravely stoic presence throughout the ordeal’s aftermath, including the ensuing bereavement services where he urged all in attendance to “go forward with the inclination to live with a faith that embodies action—help a neighbor, fight for a cause, love your family.” D’Agostino effectively develops a portrait of Petit’s perseverant, “quiet leader” characteristics through chapters on his early life as the community-minded son of a Depression-era grocery store proprietor. His modesty and hardworking ethic proved a winning combination while attending Dartmouth College and medical school and during his marriage to wife Jennifer, with whom he raised daughters Hayley and Michaela. As a pillar of his bedroom community, Petit’s tremendous grief was buffered by friends’ financial and emotional support, the healing comfort of routine, and the creation of a charitable family foundation. Old wounds reopened, however, when the killers were brought to justice in a highly publicized court case. D’Agostino’s impressive narrative dexterity evokes horror for the crime’s re-enactment yet also admiration for Petit’s ability to later sustain a new relationship and embody the possibility of surviving “the very worst of what’s possible on earth, and to go on living.”
True crime and human perseverance merge in this engrossing chronicle of a small-town atrocity.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8041-4016-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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 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
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