Investigative journalist Klaber and political scientist Melanson, curator of the Kennedy Assassination Archives at the University of Massachusetts, reopen the RFK assassination in an exhaustive and intriguing study. Klaber and Melanson tell the story of the police investigation (Sirhan Sirhan, eventually convicted of the murder, was taken into custody immediately), the trial, and the 20-year battle with the LAPD over crucial files that seem to have disappeared, as have the only photographs of the shooting by a supposedly lone gunman, which took place at L.A.'s Ambassador Hotel on June 4, 1968, at a celebration of Kennedy's victory that day in the California primary. The authors show that the police investigation and the trial glossed over key pieces of evidence, such as the reported hurried departure of a mysterious couple from the hotel moments after the shooting (reported by a respected police investigator), the testimony of several witnesses that Sirhan was accompanied by an attractive woman in a polka-dot dress, and substantial ballistic evidence that some of the shots fired did not come from Sirhan's gun. The authors point out that both the prosecution and the defense in the trial raised significant questions about whether the ballistic exhibits were properly preserved. Ending with a narrative of a 1993 interview with Sirhan in prison—in which he reiterates his admission of guilt, his denial that he worked with anyone, his motive, and his courtroom contention that he had only hazy memories of the events leading to the assassination and no actual memory of the shooting itself. The authors draw no conclusions from their account, other than that neither the investigation nor the trial have adequately explained the assassination. An eye-opening review of the evidentiary discrepancies that are possible in a celebrated criminal case, even one with over 70 witnesses and an admission of guilt by the accused. (8 pages illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: May 29, 1997
ISBN: 0-312-15398-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 8, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1997
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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