There’s less to this story than meets the eye.
Texas newsman McVicker unconvincingly attempts to paint con man and prison escape artist Steven Russell as an engaging rogue.
Currently serving 45 years for embezzling $800,000, plus another 99 years for his four breakouts from various Texas jails, Russell is impressively bold, but not exactly the master of “flamboyant, nonviolent brilliance” that McVicker depicts. Most of his escapes speak volumes more about the mind-boggling ineptitude of prison security than they do about the brilliance of Russell: for one, he dyed some prison whites with Magic Markers to impersonate a doctor; in another, he spent months faking a last-stage case of AIDS to get transferred to a nursing home (the jailhouse doctors never bothered to do a blood test); in a third, he changed clothes and convincingly played with a walkie-talkie to walk right out the front door. He was determined, but little more. Russell's criminal activities also fail to justify McVicker's fascination. If he’d been the genius the author thinks, he wouldn’t have kept getting caught for passport fraud, embezzlement, bid-rigging, insurance fraud, and felony theft. Sure, he displayed even greater determination and persistence as a crook than as an escape artist, but he wasn’t very successful as either. His love for fellow thief Phillip Morris is hardly the stuff of great romance; often enough, Morris wants to be rid of Russell, who once got him thrown in jail for a crime he had nothing to do with. (There's love for you.) Russell is no picaresque, and his escapes have netted him exactly nothing except a long stay in solitary confinement at considerable taxpayer expense. At least he’s remained true to his code of making others pay his way through life.
There’s less to this story than meets the eye.Pub Date: July 2, 2003
ISBN: 0-7868-6903-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
