A compulsively readable account of a murderer who continues to fascinate.
Guinn (The Last Gunfight: The Real Story of the Shootout at the O.K. Corral—and How It Changed the American West, 2011, etc.) paints a striking, full-length portrait of one of American history’s most notorious sociopaths.
By 1967, 32-year-old Charles Manson had spent more than half his life in reform schools, jails and prison. Released onto the streets of San Francisco during the Summer of Love, armed with a practiced street rap—a mishmash of Bible verses, Dale Carnegie quotations, Scientology precepts and rock-’n’-roll lyrics—a philosophy of free love and even freer drugs and crude psychological insights gleaned from fellow pimps and con men, the petty hustler attracted a small following among the city’s naïve, confused youth. Moving his “Family” to Los Angeles in pursuit of a music career, Manson tightened his hold on his followers and led them in increasingly bizarre escapades that culminated in several murders, most infamously the Tate-LaBianca killings, designed to kick off “Helter Skelter,” a race war that would end with the Family ruling the world. Guinn takes readers on a head-spinning ride through Manson’s deeply disturbed childhood, his criminal career and his brief tenure as satanic guru to the damaged disciples, mostly women, he held in thrall. Against the backdrop of the roiling ’60s, the author offers inside information on life within the cult, miniportraits of its various members, and stories about the dope dealers, rock musicians, motorcycle gang members, Hollywood glitterati, record-industry honchos and hangers-on who brushed up against the Family. He concludes by effortlessly unpacking the murders, the manhunt and the trial that riveted the nation. Spared the gas chamber by California’s abolition of the death penalty, Manson remains incarcerated. A handful of deluded supporters maintain a Facebook page devoted to proving his innocence and to spreading his environmental rants.
A compulsively readable account of a murderer who continues to fascinate.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4516-4516-3
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2013
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
PERSPECTIVES
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
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