Wambaugh's darkest nonfiction since The Onion Field: a sleek and steadily gripping chronicle of the rape/murder of two English girls and of the relentless manhunt for the killer, finally nabbed through the nascent technique of genetic fingerprinting. When pretty teen-ager Lynda Mann is found raped/strangled in November 1983 in the quiet English village of Narborough, police from the nearby county seat of Leicester mount a massive investigation. Led by bristly Inspector Derek Pearce, the 150-man murder squad follows up scores of leads, but a year later no probable suspect is in hand and the probe grinds to a halt. In July 1986, however, the killer strikes again—this time raping and strangling teen-ager Dawn Ashworth only a stone's throw from where he murdered Lynda. Moreover, this time the killer is apparently seen—and soon a churlish, slow-witted local boy, a kitchen porter, is confessing, albeit confusedly, to the killings. Meanwhile, however, British scientist Alec Jeffreys has devised a revolutionary new forensics technique whereby each person's unique (except for identical twins) DNA can be mapped into a distinct visual pattern. For the first time ever in a criminal case, Jeffrey's technique is applied, comparing the kitchen porter's blood with semen found on the two dead girls—and the shocker is that the DNA of the samples don't match: the kitchen porter is not the killer. Back to square one, Pearce and his men begin the greatest round-up in British crime annals, testing the DNA of the blood of over 4,000 men: Will the cops' biochemical net haul in the murderous sociopath who surely lurks in Narborough or one of its neighboring towns? A meticulous and suspenseful reconstruction that exchanges the sardonic humor of Wambaugh's recent work (The Secrets of Harry Bright, 1985; Echoes in the Darkness, 1987) for moralistic deep-delving into the suffering of the victims' families, the affectless sociopathy of the killer, and the gritty determination of the cops. A powerful and elegant police procedural.
Pub Date: Feb. 16, 1988
ISBN: 055376330X
Page Count: 428
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1988
IN THE NEWS
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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