Timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Birmingham bombing, this account, though ineptly written, does wrap up a...
The overly detailed story of a decades-late and yearslong investigation into the 1963 Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing, in which four young black girls were killed.
Thorne, a retired Birmingham police officer, focuses on two men: Ben Herren, a Birmingham police sergeant (later an FBI analyst), and his partner Bill Fleming, an FBI special agent. In 1997, Herren and Fleming were assigned to reopen the investigation into the bombing, which had been investigated twice before—once in the 1960s by the FBI and again in the ’70s by the state; the first was closed with no convictions, and the second led to a single conviction. Sorting through mountains of old files, the men compiled lists of possible witnesses, including Ku Klux Klan members and their associates and relatives. Tracking down these people, many of them now old and sick, and then interviewing them and persuading some to talk, took years. In 2001, and again in 2002, a suspect was brought to trial and convicted. Thorne presents the arguments of both the prosecution and the defense in these two trials. The portrait of the two hardworking, persistent investigators contrasts with that of the violent Klansmen, a powerful force in 1960s Birmingham. If Southern racists are the villains, the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover also comes across badly, with the Alabama attorney general later accusing the bureau of refusing to share evidence and thwarting the state’s first investigation. Thorne attempts to guide readers through the long years of interviews by providing a front-of-the-book list of names; it helps, but some judicious pruning would have made for a smoother, more readable story.
Timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Birmingham bombing, this account, though ineptly written, does wrap up a sorry episode in the city’s history and may have considerable local appeal.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-61374-864-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2013
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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