English provides an intriguing angle for hard-core mob enthusiasts or followers of the Bulger story, who will eat it up....
English (The Savage City: Race, Murder, and a Generation on the Edge, 2011, etc.) explores the organized crime underworld of Whitey Bulger.
The author has covered similar ground in Paddy Whacked (2005), and it shows in a number of ways, some that enrich the telling of the Bulger saga and some that detract. Bulger was a gangster who moved through the ranks of the Boston underworld to control much of it beginning in the 1970s. With what seemed at the time like a bulletproof coating keeping him safe, he was a formidable foe. After being tipped off to a possible arrest in 1995, Bulger disappeared. Two years later, the world finally learned the secret of Bulger’s near-magical ability to stay in business: he had been an FBI informant for almost 20 years, and the FBI had covered up evidence of his crimes in order to keep him on the payroll. When Bulger was caught in 2011, the question on English’s mind was whether or not the trial would reveal the circumstances that allowed Bulger to flourish. It did not, and the author makes a convincing case that this was a major oversight. He presents solid evidence that the Bulger problem was really an FBI corruption problem and that the world should be far more concerned with the system than just the one man. However, English’s evidence also presents a problem. He is so familiar with Bulger’s story and territory that he does not address the fact that readers may not know the background. This leaves the story of the trial, at least, curiously incomplete. The narrative is inconsistent, with extremely compelling sections alternating with excessively detailed sections that distract rather than add color.
English provides an intriguing angle for hard-core mob enthusiasts or followers of the Bulger story, who will eat it up. Those without prior knowledge, however, may lose interest.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-229098-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
Skilled and graceful exploration of the soul of an astonishing human being.
Full-immersion journalist Kidder (Home Town, 1999, etc.) tries valiantly to keep up with a front-line, muddy-and-bloody general in the war against infectious disease in Haiti and elsewhere.
The author occasionally confesses to weariness in this gripping account—and why not? Paul Farmer, who has an M.D. and a Ph.D. from Harvard, appears to be almost preternaturally intelligent, productive, energetic, and devoted to his causes. So trotting alongside him up Haitian hills, through international airports and Siberian prisons and Cuban clinics, may be beyond the capacity of a mere mortal. Kidder begins with a swift account of his first meeting with Farmer in Haiti while working on a story about American soldiers, then describes his initial visit to the doctor’s clinic, where the journalist felt he’d “encountered a miracle.” Employing guile, grit, grins, and gifts from generous donors (especially Boston contractor Tom White), Farmer has created an oasis in Haiti where TB and AIDS meet their Waterloos. The doctor has an astonishing rapport with his patients and often travels by foot for hours over difficult terrain to treat them in their dwellings (“houses” would be far too grand a word). Kidder pauses to fill in Farmer’s amazing biography: his childhood in an eccentric family sounds like something from The Mosquito Coast; a love affair with Roald Dahl’s daughter ended amicably; his marriage to a Haitian anthropologist produced a daughter whom he sees infrequently thanks to his frenetic schedule. While studying at Duke and Harvard, Kidder writes, Farmer became obsessed with public health issues; even before he’d finished his degrees he was spending much of his time in Haiti establishing the clinic that would give him both immense personal satisfaction and unsurpassed credibility in the medical worlds he hopes to influence.
Skilled and graceful exploration of the soul of an astonishing human being.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-50616-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
A courageous and thought-provoking memoir.
A bestselling memoirist’s account of coping with an unexpected midlife evolution in sexual identity.
When Wizenberg, who runs the popular Orangette blog, received a jury duty summons, she never thought that it would lead to divorce. In court, her eyes were immediately drawn to a female defense attorney dressed in a men’s suit. Her thoughts lingered on the attractive stranger after each day’s proceedings. But guilt at being “a woman wearing a wedding ring” made the author feel increasingly guilty for the obsession that seized her. Her husband, Brandon, a successful Seattle restaurateur, and their daughter were the “stars” that guided her path; the books she had written revolved like planets around the sun of their relationship and the restaurants they had founded together. However, in the weeks that followed, Wizenberg shocked herself by telling her husband about the attraction and suggesting that they open their marriage to polyamorous experimentation. Reading the work of writers like Adrienne Rich who had discovered their lesbianism later in life, Wizenberg engaged in deep, sometimes-painful self-interrogation. The author remembered the story of a married uncle, a man she resembled, who came out as gay and then later died of AIDS as well as a brief lesbian flirtation in late adolescence where “nothing happened.” Eventually, Wizenberg began dating the lawyer and fell in love with her. Wizenberg then began the painful process of separating herself from Brandon and, later, from their restaurant businesses that she had quietly seen as impediments to her writing. Feeling unfulfilled by Nora, a self-professed “stone top” who preferred to give pleasure rather than receive it, Wizenberg began to date a nonbinary person named Ash. Through that relationship, she came to embrace both gender and sexual fluidity. Interwoven throughout with research insights into the complexity of female sexual identity, Wizenberg’s book not only offers a glimpse into the shifting nature of selfhood; it also celebrates one woman’s hard-won acceptance of her own sexual difference.
A courageous and thought-provoking memoir.Pub Date: May 12, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4197-4299-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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