A compelling and clear-eyed portrait of a recognizable American community, devastated by the secret heart of a...
The banality of evil, right next door.
Over the course of 30 years, Dennis Rader, a pinched, humorless Midwestern family man, terrorized the residents of Wichita, Kan., as the “BTK Killer,” a serial murderer and sexual sadist whose nom-de-crime derived from his predilection for binding, torturing and killing his victims. No criminal mastermind, Rader so embodied the archetypical Kansas man—self-effacing, pious, reliable, conservative (he served as a scout leader and was president of his Lutheran church)—that he was able, despite a sloppy m.o. and innumerable gaffes, to elude the concentrated efforts of the Wichita Police Department and the FBI to catch him. Crime journalist Singular (Presumed Guilty, 1999, etc.) limns Rader’s daily routine, stunted inner life and grisly crimes in unfussy prose that underscores the horror of the BTK slayings with brutal effectiveness; the dryly recounted quotidian details of the victims’ (and Rader’s) lives add an excruciating poignancy and immediacy to the accounts of the murders that a more lurid approach might have obscured. Singular includes many of Rader’s taunting letters to the police, full of tortured syntax, awful poetry and chilling solipsism, and they bring the killer uncomfortably close: an unimaginably lonely and emotionally stifled man whose fantasies of murder and domination coexisted with pathetic Walter Mitty–esque flights of fancy that cast the drab cipher as James Bond or John Wayne. The author wisely leavens the horror by widening the scope of the narrative to include the law enforcement personnel dedicated to the BTK case (whose eventual capture of Rader derived from an almost comically stupid blunder by the killer), and to the heroically eccentric pastor and shell-shocked congregation of Rader’s church, who had counted Rader among the most steadfast and pious of their number.
A compelling and clear-eyed portrait of a recognizable American community, devastated by the secret heart of a quintessential good neighbor—the sort of neighbor who makes one feel comfortable leaving the doors unlocked at night.Pub Date: April 4, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-9124-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2006
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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