Though earnestly researched, the narrative feels disjointed, and the book is never quite as engrossing as the potential for...
An investigation of the world of death fraud.
The fantasy of faking one’s death or simply disappearing has sparked writers’ imaginations for centuries, from Shakespeare to Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn to the creators of TV shows such as Mad Men. Surprisingly, however, there hasn’t been much written on the actual nuts and bolts of planning such an event. Given the demands of our present era, Greenwood (Creative Writing/Columbia Univ.) believes the subject is more compelling now than ever. “Today disappearing seems virtually impossible,” she writes. “This, I think, is what accounts for our renewed fascination with it. We are burdened with our search histories and purchase histories and data stats that constitute our profile, to then be lumped and farmed out and sold to the highest bidder. Disappearing means disconnecting—unimaginable yet totally captivating. Precisely because it has become unfeasible, that deep urge to be anonymous, or even to be someone else, exists evermore powerfully within us.” In her research, the author consulted with experts such as Frank Ahearn, bestselling author of How to Disappear, and private investigator Steve Rambam. Greenwood interviewed individuals who have attempted to fake their deaths—e.g., John Darwin, who, after staging his own drowning, successfully disappeared for more than six years before becoming a local celebrity in England. The author also befriended a woman who has become the public face of the “Believers,” a committed group of fans who are certain that Michael Jackson is still alive. Ultimately, Greenwood traveled to the Philippines, a country with notoriously high incidents of death fraud, and endeavored to stage her own “pseudocide.” The author, perhaps inspired by writers such as Mary Roach or Susan Orlean, attempts a lighthearted approach to her material, interweaving personal experiences and insights, but the humor is a mixed bag.
Though earnestly researched, the narrative feels disjointed, and the book is never quite as engrossing as the potential for the intriguing content would suggest.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3933-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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