A lively narrative that illuminates the science of forensic anthropology. Ever wondered what happens to the human body while it's decomposing or to a silicone breast implant during cremation? Maples, bone expert for the Florida Museum of Natural History (affiliated with the Univ. of Florida) and crime solver extraordinaire, with Miami Herald reporter Browning, answers these questions and many more in an exceedingly well-written and accessible volume. He provides insight into his unusual profession, revealing how an experienced forensic anthropologist can glean from a few bone fragments the age, sex, race, and lifestyle of the deceased. Each chapter covers a different episode in Maple's career, from his days as a budding young scientist studying baboons in Kenya to his identification of the type of murder weapon used in the 1990 Gainesville, Fla., serial murders. Maples has trained his expertise on an assortment of murders and suicides. The most interesting chapters discuss some of his more celebrated cases, such as his analyses of the skeletons of the Elephant Man, servicemen who fought in Vietnam, and Francisco Pizarro (conqueror of the Incas); his inquiry to determine whether the 12th president of the US, Zachary Taylor, died of arsenic poisoning or natural causes; and his trip to Ekaterinaburg in 1989 to examine nine skeletons, all that remained of the last Russian czar and his entourage after the Bolsheviks executed them in 1918. Maples avoids euphemisms, describing much of his gruesome work in vivid language that may repulse some squeamish readers, but he tempers the mood with occasional doses of tasteful humor. He expresses profound respect and sympathy for the dead but stresses that he puts his emotions to the side while conducting his investigations. His occasional forays into the merits of capital punishment and the criminal justice system are less interesting, but these are minor flaws in an otherwise superb book. Not just for the morbidly curious.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-385-47490-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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